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andrew-and-leyley · 5 months

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scenario where when they were in highschool, ashley is invited to some popular boy's party as his date. andrew is pointedly not invited- he's kind of a loser, and the guy's ex left him because she was crushing on andrew.

ashley goes, despite andrew's protests.

party things ensue, and it all leads up to 7 minutes in heaven. ashley and mr popular go into the closet; she's a little excited, but really she's thinking about how she can't wait to tell andrew about the naughty shit she's about to get up to. she doesn't really care about mr popular at all- he's cute, in an andrew sort of way, she notes- and this is the first time she's ever really been asked out. she's the weird kid at school, it's always her and andy sitting by themselves at lunch, and... well, she doesn't really need anyone else, does she? andy can accept her for who she is, and if he doesn't, she can make him.

mr popular, though? she has nothing on him. she's barely ever glanced his way. the only positive thing she can attribute to him is that he's never outright bullied her or singled her out or whatever. and, weirdly, in his presence, the other kids who have done all of that shit, are quiet and even... nice?

of all the people at the party to be stuck in a closet with, he's the best one, she supposes.

maybe they start making out- he takes the lead. at first. she's not one to give up control so easily, and she can certainly make this a memorable time for him. in heated whisper, she offers to suck his dick. in the dark, she can see his surprise, but then his hands are fumbling over the zipper and button and- well, it's a little disappointing, if she's being honest.

she's seen a lot of dick in her life (that's what happens when you share a room with your brother), and it's.... well, it's fine. it's just not... his.

but it's whatever. she shrugs and gets down to her knees, and gives as good a blowjob as she can. only to jump away at the sudden light and the sound of riotous laughter from their classmates. mr popular is smirking- he's no longer cute, and the andrew charm is gone from him- and standing over her, his dick still out.

she's humiliated. her classmates are calling her a freak and a slut, mr popular is telling everyone how easy she is and how she begged him to suck his dick. weirdo, whore, and even an occasional bitch light her up from head to toe.

she leaves without saying anything, walking home in the dark on her own.

she's halfway there when she slows down, remembering that she was supposed to call andy to pick her up when she left. she'd promised him that. but it's only been... what? an hour tops?

humiliate her in front of her peers all you want- she won't be humiliated in front of andy. it takes her a few more minutes of walking to realize something else:

there's a car following her.

there's a very brief moment of panic (not even for her own safety, but if she gets kidnapped or some crazy shit, andy might never forgive her. worse, she might never see him again) before she realizes it's her mom's old, beat-up car.

looking through the windshield reveals andrew in all his "protective big brother" glory, and she stares him down as he drives up next to her. when the window rolls down, he greets her with a raised brow

he doesn't have to say anything; she pouts and walks around to the passenger side, sliding in. they sit there in silence for a minute before he reaches over her and buckles her in.

he'll ask her what happened to calling him, and she'll lie- say she forgot- in that way that andrew will know the truth regardless. he'll ask what went on at the party, and she'll be quiet.

part of her wants to tell him what she did- she knows she'll tell him eventually, anyways. they have no secrets from each other. but she's still embarrassed by the whole situation... still, even if andrew's ashamed of her, or reprimands her, it's better than not having his attention on her at all.

she'll cough up the truth, play it off as something funny and fucked up all at once, like she's always doing. andrew's hands will tense on the steering wheel, before one reaches out to hold onto her hand. he's pissed off, and she can tell, so she'll try to lighten the mood even more by saying how unimpressive mr popular's dick was compared to his.

andrew immediately pulls his hand away from her, and in a mix of flustered and angry, he curses at her, telling her to stop saying shit like that. it's a perfect distraction, his response. she knows exactly how to pull the reactions she wants from him, and given he knows about what happened, he probably feels bad enough for her to give in to whatever she wants. some sort of brotherly obligation.

she bothers him in the car the whole drive home, messing around and being stupid (she takes her buckle off a couple of times, andrew stopping the car to rebuckle her until he gives up. "die, then," he tells her, and she laughs. putting her feet up on the dashboard prompts another pull-over, where andrew is forced to get a little handsy in order to push her feet back down to the floor. etc etc)

the party's almost forgotten completely by the time they arrive, and it's only seeing her parents still awake that brings her back down from the high of the car ride. it forces her to remember that she wasn't gone long at all, and her mood sours again as she slides past her mother (not even a "welcome back" or a "how was the party" or a "you're back early") and her father (he spares her a glance and that's about it), back to her and andy's room

she's scowling and pouting in her bed as andrew comes in, turning the lights off. he climbs into his own bed, for all of a few minutes before he gets tired of her quietness.

"you okay?" he asks. she shrugs in the dark, and knows he can see it; she can feel his gaze on her. "want to..." he lifts his blanket up- an open invitation to share beds for the night.

he always kicks up a fuss when they share beds, now, and their mother definitely doesn't approve of it. (they're too old to do that now, or some other bullshit). but tonight he's offering, and it doesn't have to do with one of his nightmares or his insomnia, and it's... for her.

she leaves her bed behind quickly and practically pounces on him, preferring this over the party- even before it turned south. because tonight, andy is all hers. he wants her there. for now, at least.

#ashley #andrew #gravecest #andrew graves #ashley graves #fic #it's. not really a fic. it's more of an idea but. idk. im just gonna post it im not gonna think about it too hard LMAO #but ofc i would accept characterization criticism #im trying to get into their headspaces a little more ill get better as time goes on :)#mostly with this i wanted to dance around andrew's jealousy and the idea that ashley is indifferent to pretty much everyone other than andy #i imagine she's a freshman or sophomore in this scenario #maybe a frsshman and the popular kid's a senior while andy is a junior #ANYWAYS ill shut up now bye #my fic #< for the sake of being able to find my own stuff later

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smorgasbordofobsessions · 2 years

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liveblog: yugioh!s537-542

ep537

KAIBA'S IN EGYPT!!!!

"how could i forget the three freaks that turned my battle city tournament into a circus sideshow?

mahna's bouncing off obasa's tummy

god pharaoh looks so fucking gooooodddd

pharaoh vs. bakura

oh mahaad!!! hello

oh mahaad was he one to research the millennium items??

mahaad and pharaoh saved by mahna!

ep538

seto!!! welcome to the party!

honestly this diabound creature really is OP haha

but i do like how this is also showing off the precursor to spirit cards and those fun attributes

old master is in kal elna and "oh the spirits blame me for what happened but what i did was necessary"

bro of course they blame you you literally led the charge to kill them, to massacre the entire town - literally your fault

oh wow!!! shadaa found the tablet of diabound

old master hit shadaa with a brick right when he was going to attack the tablet great

pharaoh is so sexy all beat up and being salf-sacrificing

oh pharaoh's father!

pharaoh's father savrificed his soul to protect his son nice

ep539

what

no why are we looking at pharaoh in modern clothes. put him back in his pharaoh garb

"just when i think you can't sink any lower, you prove me wrong"

okay so this whole thing was actually a shadow game being played out on a table

"your transformation from sacred guardian to lord of darkness i snow complete"

hm pharaoh locked away his own spirit to lock zorc away

whats funny is that if seto is actually in line for the throne, he still could only take throne AFTER pharaoh had died or been killed because pharaoh was the direct descendent of the old pharaoh, and the master was the brother of the ex-pharaoh

so, seto couldn't even become pharaoh anywas because he's second in line for the throne, just like his "father" was

stupid

ep540

modern day!kaiba sees bakura slumped on the stairs and walked right by him with a passing comment

"bon appetite"

"yep. we're floating on a fat guy"

hm so obasa was a "shortcut" in bakura's words

wow egyptian!pharaoh is so fucking sexy god

"i forgot how strong my bond with yugi truly is"

ep541

so bakura ressurrected his ancient selk, transported seto and his "father" away so that the "father" could ""convince"" seto to joint eh dark side, and diamound is back because he's using the power of the millennium tablet to fuel himself

kaiba has woken up in the past!!!!!!

mmm egyptian!pharaoh

okay mahaad why did you think that one attack would stop a swarm of locusts

pharoah's voice literally broke a bit and so did my heart he's so emotional!!!!!!

kareem is gone :(

and pharaoh has "seen enough"

this i slike the tenth time he's sad "it's time to put an end to this madness" but okay

"this egyptian is all greek to me!"

ep542

how have none of the gang realized how fucking weird tristan is acting

seto cannot be convinced to join the dark side and that's a great thing

but now we see how blue eyes got into the tablet and that's because kisara tok the attack meant fo rhim

so the old man took over seto's mind because seto was not joining him

and now he's defeated. nice

modern!kaiba is fucking great

god pharaoh looks so fucking good

"you may buy into the delusion that you're some hotshot pharaoh, but i don't. but pharaoh or no pharaoh, no one tells seto kaiba what to do, am i clear."

yugi and pharaoh are true friends

and yugi's friends were his wish i want to cry (but i can't because i have makeup on)

"what's gotten into you?" "something very powerful!"

so it's been revealed that tristan isn't 100%

noooo fucking way would that really work out in real life

so it's been revealed that tristan was actually controlled by bakura nad now the gang has pharaoh's name and now they have to deul bakura!!

#yugioh #ygo #liveblog

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mymarifae · 2 years

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1 i love your mobile theme 2 what do you think kris, not us, thinks of the queen? or thinks of anything, like i keep wondering what are their thoughts about people they meet and interact with but never get to be themself around?

aw thank you!! :D

UM okay we may be controlling kris, but they can express themself pretty well! our control isn't absolute and we really can't like... erase their personality and make them act like an entirely different person. barring a snowgrave route, and part of that can be attributed to the fact that once kris realizes we're really going to do this, they just. check out. they stop participating. versus the normal game, where they are very much present.

we tell them where to go, what to look at, and sometimes even what to say. but what we can't control is how they say something - as sometimes other characters will note they sound sarcastic, etc. for certain dialogue options. when we get a choice to like, eat moss or chew on the ralsei dummy, that comes from them. if we weren't in control these are things kris would be thinking and trying to decide if they should do or not. this is why our control is kind of really limited. a lot of what we're presented with already comes from kris.

anyway all that to say: kris is being themself! for the most part. so we can pretty clearly see what they think and how they feel about the people around them

so for your original question. they like queen! when she suggests playing that game again, they move toward it without any input. they really did want to play and just have a nice moment with her! (cries a little about this) and later in that fight by the fountain, if you have them make a toast to her, they do so in a really sincere and heartfelt manner. this is their own decision, like all we do is tell them Toast... and then they have the agency to carry out the action however they please. and this applies to basically everything else we have them do

they're enjoying their dark world adventures. they're having fun and they really care about and love their friends. especially susie. their love for her is unparalleled my god. in fact, the only person (minus spade king but he is not a character to me he is a thing that just needs to die forever) they've demonstrated any kind of strong negative feelings towards is spamton. like they are Extremely freaked out by him and Do Not want to interact with him, as seen with the increasingly desperate options to RUN AWAY from his shop. but they still want to ask if they can be friends... (since the text for that option is highlighted in yellow, i think that indicates that they really wanted to ask it!) they still want to try, despite the discomfort. they're a sweet kid

so ya :) that's my two cents on that !!

#i feel a bit sick so sorry if my thoughts here are a bit harder to follow...#kris deltarune.#character of all time i adore them a lot #all of the kids in this game make me feel a lot of things.....sniffles #susie's my favorite but kris is very much an extremely close second #there's a lot we dont know about them yet but there's a lot we Do know #they are an off-putting but goodhearted little darling ^^and they are the world #i hope We can become friends with them too...#mailbox #deltarune. my brain is simply full of it help send help

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teeswinx · 3 years

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I just saw your magicRiven post and- rant? I HC magic to be primarily feminine trait, and guys HAVE it but it is dormant and passed down through a recessive gene to their daughters. But SOMETIMES it is active, and no one figures out why. But because it manifests in weird ways (no winx, no witch) and is rare they can't really attend actual schools for it so only very wealthy people can afford private tutors for boys with magic. Ergo, Riven WOULD be a menace to society because there's no way he's affording that, he's extremely lucky to even be at red fountain. So he's completely self taught.

And now on what magic he'd have? Earth based, sure. Earth based NECROMANCY. And not like evil zombies ugga bugga, he can just bring dead to life and control it (or decide NOT to control it, leading to scares in the woods thanks to undead birds and deer roaming around).

Which, if he had developed it enough, would have really helped in the whole Army of Decay bs because like, rot is dead things. And that's his thing.

Sky would freak out with a roommate like that tho. And I'd love to see it.

(also Riven deserves to actually have something that EARNS him his resident edgy character damn it, besides being angry all the time -.-

(idk if you watched castlevania but I'm pretty much thinking forgemaster but like, #cottagecore xD

I personally don’t hc magic as a feminine trait, but I like ur hcs anon. Necromancer Riven is cool and I agree it would attribute to his edgyness, but I personally am a sucker for giving characters powers that are completely opposite their personality, so I’d probably assign Riven something that demands concentration and calm

(Perhaps Helia would be the necromancer just because he’s the last guy you’d expect to raise the dead)

#asks #TAM au

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baddyzarc · 4 years

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.........

it always fascinated me whether, either by accident or on purpose, the Arclights seemed to have a connection to the Barians Emperors (bar Nasch and Merag due to plot reasons) via the color they glow when they become—for the lack of a better word—aroused.

I might be stretching for some of these and the glows could be like, stock-image stuff, but eh, I've been creatively-drained lately due to skool and I wanna write

I found some fun connections between the groups, and it could work especially since the Emperors were the ones who gifted the Arclights with the crests, therefore it could be possible that by giving them the crests, the Arclights "adopted" or inherited parts of the donor's personalities. The show doesnt explicitly state what happened here (although the dub attributed this whole scheme to vector which is,,, hella funny for unintentional reasons,,,) but through fearsome foursome dialogue, we can assume that the Arclights are known to Barian World so the kids must've been slightly more involved in Barian World.

The most obvious connection to me is Trey because you know

This whole thing.

I'm 99% sure this isn't historically accurate, but let's pretend. At first I thought the gladiator garb was random (since Trey was the only one who did this, we can't gauge what the writers were going for) but it makes a lot of sense if he were to inherite his powers from Alito, who was a gladiator in his past life. When his powers was enchanced through Tron, it revealed the depths of what Alito gave him. Just, gladiator vibes but it's cool though.

Michael's crest is orange but when he gets hella angery, he glows the same reddish tint as Alito, so this still falls in line with my theory. They also share a lot of things in-common, including being the first of their group to befriend Yuma. Both originally came on as kind and devoted to Yuma and not evil, then went full evil for a good chunk of time, both due to circumstances—either through Don Thousand or the enchanced crest. They were also the first of their group to help Yuma after snapping out of their rage state: Trey when he came back to fight Erazor and Alito deciding they should team up to fight Don Thousand. (They also fell into a coma after being defeated by Yuma for different reasons but I don't think this counts for anything). The gladiator stuff sells it for me though.

Then there's Christopher. He glows the same color as Durbe, who is the leader of the Emperors in the absence of Nasch.

The likeness isn't as clear as Michael aside from certain traits. They're both smart (this is up for debate don't @ me) and take on the leader role of their group (after Tron skedaddled for season 2). They're stoic, calm, hot, have intimacy with certain spaceships and a book, etc...

Something I found kinda interesting is this

Durbe was the first we see to wear a bracelet to control his Barian powers on Earth, and according to Michael, Quinton made the bracelets in order to control their crests. I thought this was a neat tie-in since Durbe gave the rest of the Emperors the Barian Sphere Field cubes to use while Christopher ultilized the Crest Sphere Field during the duel with the barians.

Chris and Durbe has the least relation though, so that's all I have to say.

Tron is weird because he has two glows, which corresponds to both Vector and Mizael. This makes sense since he does have properties from both. If my memory is correct, the purple one only appeared during duel against Yuma (maybe the one before it during a dream sequence but idk), while most scenes gave him a yellowish outline.

The show portrays Vetrix as sadistic but sly like a fox. This half came from Vector, from how he tortured Hart and Kaito and Droite and his kids mentally. He's heartless, and he isn't afraid to let the world know this. Like Vector. On the other hand, what I think he inherited from Mizael is that "Barian Superiority" complex. Tron said he only trusts barians because they saved him (unrelated, but I think it's funny that he desired Shark, a barian, to fight for him like no tomorrow but then straight-up hospitalized Rio, also a barian), and the only other Emperor who bears this trait is Mizael. Most of the others are like "cool, we barians" but Mizael is proud of the fact and despises humans because of it.

I like to think that Mizael was supposed to give Tron the crest in order to ensure he stays loyal to the Barians, but then Vector shimmied in and infected him with his own powers, thus amplifying his lust for revenge and destruction because Vector would.

Vetrix and Mizael also have big roles in the growth of Kaito's character, where in one it allows us to Kaito's vulnerable side (Hart plots) and the other his compassionate (Galaxy-Eyes Master plots).

And although this has to do more with Thomas than Tron himself, Vetrix's Vector half made him torment and chase Shark around for seemingly no reason (as far as the audience knows at that point in the show).

And this dood. Quattto, I think it's obvious what he got from Vector. The sadism, the cruelty, whatever that was idk it freaks me out I have a phobia of death by machinery I don't like thinking about this.

Most likely Thomas was the one who inherited Vector's nastier traits, and his hatred for Shark. He's shown to be cruel because he finds it fun, and for both Thomas and Vector, they hurt people solely for entertainment. They also have the whole "Ray Shadows" and "Fanservice" thing going on, where they hide their monstrous personalities under a positive mask. Might be a bit of stretch, but both were shown to be kinder when they were young. Circumstance and the crest made Thomas cruel, while Vector became and stayed cruel because of Don Thousand (this is weird bc Vector knows he was brainwashed but prefers being evil anyways). Thomas hurt Rio to get to Shark, Vector killed Merag to get to Nasch. There's a lot if we compare their relationships with Shark.

Furthermore, and this may also be one of those stretches, but the flags on Vector's ships feature a cracked skull with a jagged streak running across the eye. To me, it reminds me of IV's scar (which he acquired after hurting Rio (merag) for Tron (also vector) this is a big circle I have something here but I can't, connect, it,,,) Plus Japanese "4" = death and death = skull

Furthermore, Thomas was used to awaken the Barian Rage within Shark, and if Thomas had parts of his personality as Vector, it could be said that Shark's inner Barian could be responding to the negativity of Vector through Thomas, hence why Tron used Tombo as bait. Or maybe it just worked out like that.

Lastly, I like to brush up on something else. It's safe to say that the Barians are loyal to Barian World regardless of whether they were originally meant for Astral World or not. After acquiring their true memories, they still fought for Barian World and straight up stated this multiple times, particularly Mizar and Alito. Likewise, the Arclights bore these loyal traits. Trey, Quattro, and Quinton were loyal to Tron even after all the shit he gave them. They were also loyal to their counterpart in the second season (Yuma, Shark, Kite) and defended them with their life. During the Barian Onslaught, Quattro died because he was super loyal to Shark and believed he existed in Nasch despite the evidence. Trey and Quinton died in order to make sure Kaito and Yuma got to their destinations safely, and they knew that would be the outcome. Tron was loyal to his cause of revenge, then to Earth during the final boss duel.

OK.

But something's missing. Not Merag and Nasch because they weren't there during the Tron-Emperor fiasco.

Oh, yes GilRag

If the Arclights and Barian have a 1:1 matchup, who does Gilag represent

Obviously it's

the dog

See, the dog is obviously the best Arclight (this is NOT up for debate) and if you take out Nasch, the best Emperor is Gilag for reasons. This aligns. Checkmate.

Also the raccoon. The dog is furry, the raccoon is furry, gilag is furry, it makes sense okay.

So there we have it, each Arclight corresponds to an Emperor after inheritancing the crest, good night

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easyhairstylesbest · 3 years

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Lauren Oyler on Writing a Book 'Good Enough So People Can't Hatchet-Job You'

Lauren Oyler is the kind of literary critic who makes thin-skinned writers think twice about putting their thoughts onto the page. She once questioned if New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino had ever met someone who wasn’t pretty (yikes!) and asserted that the best-selling novel American Dirt could have “perhaps used a little more self-doubt” (…fair). With bylines in the London Review of Books, New York Times, The Baffler, and more, Oyler often reflects on online phenomena like the popular rise of astrology and the destabilizing effect of social media on our collective mental health. More than one of her pieces of criticism have gone viral, a feat for the genre in its own right, but all the more extraordinary for their lack of sensationalism. Though her critique is often sharp-edged, it does not sacrifice nuance.

Now, she’s turned efforts to her own novel, Fake Accounts, which distills much of her critical musings into a timely premise, with a protagonist who feels like someone you follow on Twitter—an Internet writer who lives in New York City. The unnamed narrator discovers that her boyfriend of several years has been hiding a second life as a popular online conspiracy theorist on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, but as she roves the sea of pink pussy hats at the 2017 Women’s March that same weekend, her boyfriend dies in a freak accident before she can confront him. Left in a social media-hazed mania, the narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on a truly deranged online dating spree and other expat follies.

The book mirrors details from Oyler’s own life—a writer, often for the internet, who lives part-time in Berlin—and parodies the contemporary literary trends she often critiques, like autofiction and the fragmented structure popularized by Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, to explore the tension and lack of distinction between our real and online personas. If, like much of the population, you are addicted to social media, the book resonates in a very specific way.

ELLE.com talks with the author about how she deals with her inner critical voice, her lukewarm feelings about social media detoxes, and how she found empowerment in blurring the lines of her online persona through fiction.

I first heard about your book after seeing a tweet from Emily Gould that calls you an “enormous bitch” but then praises the novel as “unimpeachably great.” How do you unpack a comment like that?

Ha! I don’t think Emily meant that being a bitch is a bad thing necessarily. We’re so used to seeing more or less positive criticism or only tepidly questioning criticism, but not a ton of harsh book criticism, so I seem like more of a bitch than I think I am. But I mean, that’s totally what I was going for—make the book good enough so people can’t hatchet-job you, right? That’s what everybody is going for, I hope.

I imagine that task was really challenging as someone who reviews books. How were you able to shut off those critical voices and write?

I think a lot of people are probably feeling pressure from hypothetical critics now. Social media puts everybody in this position where you’re constantly imagining how something is going to be taken the wrong way, or the least generous reading of something that could possibly be made. How likely is it that someone will make it? There’s an aspect of the novel where the narrator is constantly anticipating the reader’s thoughts, and she is trying to justify her thinking or how she’s behaving. So I think that’s a broader issue and not just related to the fact that I’m a “bitch.” [Laughs]

AKA critic! Reading your criticism, I have been struck by the level of authority you assume—as a writer, I always struggle with “what’s my right” to say any of this. I’m curious where that comes from for you.

I think it does come in part from growing up in a place where people were not quite interested in the same things I was. I grew up in Hurricane, West Virginia, a small town between Charleston and Huntington, and I was not a total misfit, but I wasn’t encouraged the way I might have been if I had gone to a nice private school in New York City. I had to learn to trust my process of thinking through objections and criticism and shoring up all sides—because I do feel, and maybe some people would disagree, that I think quite a lot about things before I say them, and that’s part of where the sense of confidence comes from. But I do have social media-inflicted paranoia.

You’ve written a lot about social media as a critic—what made you want to approach the topic from a literary standpoint?

There’s this idea that floats around periodically that the realist novel is not equipped to respond to the pace and technology of the day, and you can’t put the Internet in a novel and have it still be literary because the Internet is inherently tacky and ephemeral and nothing on it matters and everyone on it is kind of stupid. We have this idea about literary fiction, that it has to be very elevated and concerned with the greatest issues of human life, but I think the compulsion to be sort of ephemeral and the willingness to be stupid in public without thinking much about it is a very human impulse. I was interested in this idea of the realist novel and the quote-unquote “traditional novel” that is supposed to be inimical to the Internet and social media.

What was your writing process like?

When I started thinking about writing this novel, the voice didn’t come to me immediately. I was really struggling with it. And then I wrote a version of the first paragraph, which has this much more cynical, slightly complicated tone with an inherent ironic quality that is really appealing to me, and then went from there.

One thing I thought about a lot is the possibility that people will read the book autobiographically in some way and take something about me from the protagonist. I started to feel very empowered by that, building up this fake persona that was still definitely connected to my real self.

That sounds absolutely terrifying to me.

I think it’s personally empowering because I don’t think I care if someone thinks a certain detail or one of the things the protagonist says is attributable to me. It may be attributable to me, or it may not be, and keeping both possibilities alive throughout the text is something I was concerned with. I think what is compelling about experiencing art and also making it is that it allows you to create your own agency. You can, within the confines of the work, do more or less whatever you want. I think it’s very important for people to have at least one sphere of life where you can sort of control how it works.

I have listened to and read a lot of interviews with authors who get frustrated with the notion that some part of their novel is autobiographical, and they have a point, but I also think the process of writing a novel is one in which you are pulling all sorts of things from your life. You only have what’s in your mind, what you can imagine or experience. Now, increasingly, we live in a time where we just know a lot about each other, and what I try to show in the book is that the construction of online persona versus the construction of a quote-unquote “real persona” is a very fluid process. You can’t point to any one thing and say that’s real and that’s fake. There are definitely things that are straightforward lies, but there are lots of ways to fudge things without lying and, in some way, you’re being more truthful by not being completely honest, which is the nature of fiction traditionally—that it’s saying something true by saying something false.

As a literary critic, how do you hope your book is received?

First of all, I know this is a trick question, but I hope it’s not just seen as a commentary on social media, because I think that discussion of social media even now can be siloed, like, “Oh, that’s what’s happening on the Internet. That’s an Internet writer.” I would ideally not be considered a quote-unquote, “Internet writer.” I would be considered a writer, one of whose themes is the internet.

“I started to feel very empowered by that, building up this fake persona that was still definitely connected to my real self.”

Has your relationship to social media changed since the pandemic?

I’ve got to say no, but that’s because I didn’t have a job before, so I was always on the computer at my house and I continued to be on the computer at my house. I’m kind of disappointed that I haven’t had an awakening that allows me to get off it for good. I did take a five-month break last year, and that was sort of nice, but it didn’t change me as much as I hoped. I obviously get quite a lot out of social media—my career definitely has a lot to do with having been on Twitter for ten years—and I think it’s very fascinating just to watch people and see what they do on it and how they respond and interpret things. It’s an amazing opportunity to watch this many people just behave.

What books or authors do you think people should read more of?

As far as contemporary authors go, I think Miriam Toews deserves much more attention. I loved Patrick deWitt’s novel French Exit, which didn’t get very much attention when it came out (and looking it up just now, I had no idea it was made into a movie). More people can always be told about The Last Samurai and Helen DeWitt (no relation to Patrick, I think). Joan Silber, Percival Everett. I think it’s safe to say that most authors in translation who aren’t extremely famous deserve more attention; it’s hard to go wrong with translated books in the U.S. because so few authors get translated, and the ones who do are usually some of the most renowned authors in their own countries. Which is a problem, because in the U.S. we have no idea what’s going on with contemporary literary culture in other countries, but it’s a useful way to narrow your search. Daša Drndić, Jenny Erpenbeck, Alina Bronsky (I liked The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine). Tove Ditlevsen’s memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, are being reissued by FSG in January, and I wrote about them and loved them. I still think about the book Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, who has a few other books out here, too.

Annie Werner Annie Werner is a writer from Texas living in New York.

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