So Sad Today

So sad today? Many are. Melissa Broder is too. How and why did she get to be so sad? And should she stay sad?

She asks herself these questions over and over here, turning them into a darkly mesmerising and strangely uplifting reading experience through coruscating honesty and a total lack of self-deceit.

Sexually confused, a recovering addict, suffering from an eating disorder and marked by one very strange sex fetish: Broder's life is full of extremes. But from her days working for a Tantric nonprofit in San Francisco to caring for a severely ill husband, there's no subject that Broder is afraid to write about, and no shortage of readers who can relate. When she started an anonymous Twitter feed @sosadtoday to express her darkest feelings, her unflinching frankness and twisted humour soon gained a huge cult following.

In its treatment of anxiety, depression, illness and instability; by its fearless exploration of the author's romantic relationships ('romantic' is an expanded term in her hands); and with its inventive imagery and deadpan humour, So Sad Today is radical. It is an unapologetic, unblinkingly intimate book which splays out a soul and a prose of unusual beauty.



'It would have been easy for Broder to stay anonymous and simply publish a book of ... popular tweets, but instead, she chose to challenge herself in what turned out to be a triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose.'
-Vanity Fair

'Broder chronicles her battle with sadness in an addictively wry voice that may inspire you to crawl into your own hole of self-aware self-hate and laugh at the cruel madness of it all from within ... To classify So Sad Today as the latest popular entry in a wave of confessional, feminist lit is to undersell its grander preoccupation with the horror and the humanity of the depressive mind. While Broder aligns herself with and agonises over distinctly female issues, her gendered angst and healthy righteousness routinely collapse into the extremities of her mercurial mental state ... reading Broder's book is a reminder of how humour can spring organically from darkness - not as a result of sadness but in spite of it - and Broder is unusually gifted at harnessing its defensive power.
-Amanda Coakley, Slate

'If So Sad Today attempts to preserve the essence of the Twitter account, it also adheres to the more straightforward conventions of memoir. Where @SoSadToday was the device of a universal sad girl, the book conveys the experiences of a single struggling woman ... Like her Twitter feed, Broder's essays often left me with a sharp sense of feminine recognition. I would read her accounts of heartbreak, sexual dissatisfaction, and alienation and think, Same - the solitary reader's equivalent of a fave or a retweet. But recognition is not the same as deep connection, and Broder's preemptively dismissive sense of humour just as often acted as a barrier keeping me out.'
-Haley Mlotek, The New Yorker