So Sad Today

Personal Essays

By: Melissa Broder

Narrated by: Melissa Broder

From acclaimed poet and creator of the popular twitter account @SoSadToday comes the darkly funny and brutally honest collection of essays that Roxane Gay called "sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous."

Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings, and which quickly gained a dedicated following. In So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter, grappling with sex, death, love low self-esteem, addiction, and the drama of waiting for the universe to text you back.

With insights as sharp as her humor, Broder explores--in prose that is both ballsy and beautiful, aggressively colloquial and achingly poetic--questions most of us are afraid to even acknowledge, let alone answer, in order to discover what it really means to be a person in this modern world.

Critic reviews

"At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays (named for Broder's popular Twitter handle) is as raw as it is funny."—Cosmopolitan

"If her Twitter account is a darkly comic 'creative way to distract myself and cope,' as [Melissa Broder] describes it, then her essays are deeper excavations of that same mind."—Elle

"Broder may be talking about things like sexts, Botox, and crushes, but these things are considered alongside contemplations about mortality, identity, and the difficulty of finding substance in a world where sometimes it's so much easier to exist behind a screen."—The Fader

"Her writing is deeply personal, sophisticated in its wit, and at the same time, devastating. SO SAD TODAY is a portrait of modern day existence told with provocative, irreverent honesty."
—Nylon

"If Melissa Broder weren't so fucking funny I would have wept through this entire book. Love, sex, addiction, mental illness and childhood trauma all join hands and dance in a circle, to the tune of Melissa's unmatched wit and dementedly perfect take on this terrifying orb we call home."—LennyLetter.com

"Instead of supersizing her angsty tweets, Broder presents a dizzying array of intimate dispatches and confessions...She has a near-supernatural ability to not only lay bare her darkest secrets, but to festoon those secrets with jokes, subterfuge, deep shame, bravado, and poetic turns of phrase."—New York Magazine

"It would have been easy for Broder to stay anonymous and simply publish a book of @SoSadToday's most popular tweets, but instead, she chose to challenge herself in what turned out to be a triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose."—VanityFair.com

"Under her beloved Twitter persona So Sad Today, Broder is probably the Internet's most powerful merchant of feelings."—GQ.com

"SO SAD TODAY is a desperately honest collection of essays, the kind that make you cringe as you eagerly, shamelessly consume them. Melissa Broder lays herself bare but she does so with strength, savvy, and style. Above all, these essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now."—Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist

"Melissa Broder's essays are as raw as an open vein."—Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood

"What a decadent, hilarious, important, devastating book this is. SO SAD TODAY will explode on impact in your mind."—Jami Attenberg, New York Times bestselling author of The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie

Connection

I absolutely loved this book. I’ve never connected to a book on such an intimate level.

I wish I could commit to something half as much as Broder committed to this book

Broder is uncomfortably honest then entire book, which made me feel ridiculously comfortable while reading it. I related to every word on every page. Her chapter on her husband’s chronic illness was the most accurate account of what it’s like to have an invisible illness (I have similar illnesses and have read a stupid number of books written by other sick people- but she did it better than most). She is eerily accurate about the ugliness of illness. Her understanding of her own flaws, as well as others without being judgmental is incredible. She gets it.

I get why it’s not for everyone

Honestly I understand why some people can’t stomach this book but it’s one of the most brutally honest and insightful things I’ve ever read about mental health

What an excellent experience…

I like to consider myself fairly connected when it comes to popular culture, but somehow I’d never stumbled upon Melissa Broder’s work before - never stumbled upon SO SAD TODAY, her Twitter feed about her own personal struggles and life with anxiety and depression. Things many people experience on one level or another. Things I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember but never felt totally comfortable fully expressing until more recently on my Instagram feed. I definitely want to visit her feed more to see the germination of tweets that would become the full blown essays that populate this book cause I too have been interested in taking posts from my Instagram and expanding upon them. To that end I’ve been listening to Natalie Goldberg and Joyce Maynard about writing creative nonfiction, and I love how both encourage us to read. Having ploughed through May Sarton’s JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE, I stumbled upon Broder on Amazon Kindle and Audible and picked up her book. It felt like discovering Leonard Cohen for the first time in his work BEAUTIFUL LOSERS. Broder’s work here is brave, no experience too taboo. All ultimately heartfelt and having just finished listening to her read, I feel a reverence for her. I tried to be brave in a university course a few years ago in a work I masked as fiction, but although I scored 98% on it I got chastised for the parts I had chose to read aloud, as the content was darker and explored my loneliness and confusion with sexuality. I never told the teacher that several classmates, most female approached me after the class to thank me for sharing and to keep writing cause it was powerful. She too, the professor, didn’t say it wasn’t great or anything and shared their enthusiasm but the comment about what to share or not always kinda stuck too me, especially as the me too movement happened not long after that class. But like Goldberg and Maynard both said, if it’s honest and true, then don’t shy away from sharing your experiences. And I’m glad Broder did just that. A fascinating read, and interesting trajectory of growth and discovery for the book itself. It makes me think of Weir’s THE MARTIAN, how he released it piecemeal over many years online and then on Kindle for free (or as close to free as they allow), and it got more and more exposure. But I digress. Read this. Especially if you’re young and trying to find your place in the world. There’s so much truth here.

Interesting

Anyone who is just a bit off and has struggled with their own minds will immediately understand this book, even if the specific instances listed by the author aren't similar to their own - it does get pretty graphic with descriptions of sexual acts, but this is greatly overshadowed by how brutally honest it is; I certainly couldn't open up this much to the general public, and it's worth a read just for that alone.