happy Lauren Oyler week to all who celebrate

Someday, our grandchildren will ask us: where were you when the Lauren Oyler takedown appeared in Bookforum?

I was in the car. My husband was driving us to a park to watch the eclipse and I was on my phone because that’s where I live. That’s when I saw Adam O’Fallon Price tweet two tantalizing excerpts from a review in the print edition.

You can now read the review, by Ann Manov, online—by now, I’m sure you already have.

If the name Lauren Oyler is unfamiliar, Manov explains Oyler’s reputation in her review:

Oyler owes her present notoriety to “takedowns” of a series of prominent women—Roxane Gay, Greta Gerwig, Sally Rooney, Jia Tolentino. These pieces broke little intellectual ground but were full of fun one-liners like “The essays in Bad Feminist exhibit the kind of style that makes you wonder whether literature is dead and we have killed it,” and “I get the sense that [Jia Tolentino] must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women, if she has ever met one.” 

In Interview magazine, Steven Phillips-Horst put it this way: “Tolentino was a writer I felt got too much credit for making facile observations, and I whispered as much to other writers I knew. That Oyler had the temerity to slaughter a sacred cow was a sign she was in the trenches with the rest of us.”

In Bookforum, Manov judges Oyler’s new essay collection No Judgment with a terrifying scrupulousness, and finds multiple instances where Oyler drew on Wikipedia or the first page of google results for her research. Manov proves she can be just as mean-funny as the object of her derision: “Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.”

As one of my friends put it, “Lauren Oyler got Lauren Oyler’d.”

The same audience who delighted in Oyler’s demolition of Jia Tolentino is now reveling in Oyler’s destruction, and it’s making me think again about the girlboss, and how much pleasure we take in building women up just to watch them fall down.

It’s like the grown-up version of building a huge block tower just to knock it down.

little girl excitedly destroying tower of blocks

At lunch yesterday, another writer pointed out that this is actually one way to get a foothold in the attention economy: by writing the takedown no one can stop talking about (e.g., Natalie Beach).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Ann Manov’s own book deal was announced this week.

On TikTok,

Eleanor Stern

says, “It kind of disturbs me that so much of the popular literary criticism ecosystem right now is basically people becoming literary It Girls by writing viral reviews taking down other literary It Girls.”

@eleanor.sternam i part of the problem w this tiktok? maybe! #books #literature #literarycriticism

Tiktok failed to load.

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I have my own pet theory on this that I’m calling “recreational judgment” to explain why we enjoy watching people destroy each other’s lives on reality TV shows, or reading gossip elevated to magazine cover story, or takedown pieces of women we once vaunted—at the exact same time that we are hyperconscious of being perceived as virtuous and politically correct. Judging reality TV stars, or microcelebrities, feels “permissable” because these are public figures, so we can safely indulge in our mocking, snark, and scorn, without consequences.

Hey, we tell ourselves, if they didn’t want to be judged, they never should have gone on Love Is Blind in the first place!

I’ve decided to be both Team Manov and Team Oyler. I think their battle is fair. By “fair” I don’t mean that I agree with Manov’s assessment of Oyler’s essay collection (I haven’t read it). I mean that Manov fought fair—she didn’t trash Oyler on Twitter or Instagram or on her podcast. She wrote a meticulous review of a book she found lacking. Oyler’s review of Tolentino was equivalently fair.

As Eleanor Stern says on TikTok, a healthy literary culture has to include both rave reviews and defensible criticism. To that I would add that I far prefer a literary feud in the pages of Bookforum to reader-driven cancellation campaigns waged on Twitter and Goodreads.

At the end of 2022, it was announced that Bookforum would cease publishing. Thankfully, the Nation brought it back.

To celebrate Lauren Oyler week, I’m becoming a paid subscriber of Bookforum today. You can join me by clicking here.

Last chance to win a consult from me

My cousin’s fundraising auction closes on 4/20, so get your bids in this week!

You can win a consult with me (over Zoom) on your social media content strategy (current bid is only $150! a bargain) or an in-person lunch with me to discuss your book.

Other items you might be interested in:

• A get unstuck coaching call (and mini tarot reading) with

  Sarah Lyn Rogers
  , who edited my fifth book

• A portrait of your pet by New Yorker cartoonist

  Dana Jeri Maier

• An original poem by

  Lyndsay Rush
  AKA Mary Oliver’s Drunk Cousin

Your bids support Hospitality Pathways, a 501c3 nonprofit in NYC that helps train the next generation of hospitality professionals.