The writers are fighting

No one has written a more scathing takedown of an author than the ones currently being shared about Lauren Oyler since, well, Lauren Oyler. The Fake Accounts (2021) author, best known for her brutal critiques of fellow writers like Roxane Gay, Jia Tolentino, Greta Gerwig, and Sally Rooney, has a new essay collection called No Judgment out now, and the response has been—to put it lightly—the exact opposite of the title. If you follow even one literary-inclined person on Twitter/X, you’ve probably heard about Oyler “getting woman’d,” or maybe you followed the side drama over a literary agent tweeting out her real sales numbers. If you’re feeling left out of the conversation (as The Cut has shown us recently, there are few things more delightful online than writers fighting), here’s the situation in brief.

A lot of the schadenfreude people have been reveling in stems back to a review published on Bookforum by writer Ann Manov. Manov’s critique heard ‘round the world opens by claiming, “Much like Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts, with its Women’s March plot, long meditations on social media trolls, and thirty-nine-page parody of Jenny Offill, No Judgment is already dated, even before its release.” That’s the kind of energy we’re working with here, and the review only continues to dole out punches as it progresses. “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,” Manov writes elsewhere, ending by claiming that “the pieces in No Judgment are airless, involuted exercises in typing by a person who’s spent too much time thinking about petty infighting and too little time thinking about anything else.”

But that’s not entirely true; Oyler has also clearly thought a lot about what she’s “not supposed to say,” ensuring, of course, that she says those things in the most eye-rollingly pretentious way imaginable. The author used the phrase in two separate interviews with The Paris Review and Interview Magazine, both published this week on top of existing negative reviews from The Guardian, The Washington Post, and more. (For the record, the response to No Judgment hasn’t been all bad—the collection got mostly favorable reviews from outlets like The Nation and The New York Times.)

In her Paris Review interview, Oyler specifically addressed the fact that you’re “not supposed to say” you have “a natural talent for writing and a unique relationship to language,” a self-identification that she called even more attention to by addressing it in this way. “[Y]ou’re supposed to say, ‘I am so lucky to have a career, I am no better than anyone else,’” she continued. “I have been very ambitious since I was fourteen years old. I don’t know why.” In the latter interview, she also brought up her elite education in the same manner, saying, “There’s this ironic voice that I use sometimes that allows me to say, ‘Isn’t it funny I went to an Ivy League school?’ And I think that’s disarming, because you’re not actually supposed to say that, right?”

If you went to a school like Yale—Oyler’s alma mater you’re not supposed to ever mention, apparently—you’ve probably met a dozen Lauren Oylers and immediately understand why people are delighting so much in her downfall. The publishing industry may be increasingly overrun by the BookTok set, but there will always be room for a good old fashioned, extremely well written bitch off. And if you’re reading all of this thinking people are being a little too nasty (a totally valid perspective), you can just refer back to the following passage that the queen of mean reviews included in her own book (via Bookforum): “I’ve come to believe the best unfollowable advice we are given about gossip is not about gossip specifically, but about our relationship to other people in general: do unto them as you would have them do unto you.” Message received.