Melissa Broder Is A Superficial Woman Of Depth

Imagine if you will, telling all your worst most disgusting flaws to the world. Your most shameful thoughts, the ones that pass throughout the day but you don’t let define you. Imagine that. Telling the whole world about them. Casually. Then somehow finding a point of grace—something redemptive about it to make you fully human again, fully worthy. Fully freed of shame.

That’s kind of what it’s like to read So Sad Today. A book of personal essays that takes the word personal to heart and really puts it out there. Really lays the narrating subject (presumably the author) bare.

Horrifically yet refreshingly honest, her confessions become a catharsis of your own. Her courage: yours. Her gritty way of seeing the world, a validation of your life.

Mistake it not though for a melodrama, a crying out of the ovaries. This is literary and smart and crude all in one. Progressive as hell and down with all kinds of old and new age philosophies.

Each essay stands on its own but is cohesive with the next in putting together the pieces of this self proclaimed “superficial woman of depth” who is a good and a bad feminist at once, an over and under eater at once, a vain and indiscriminating lover all at once.