It is not surprising that there is this dispersion in the mood of people now on social media, as if they do not need another reason to migrate to other platforms. I remember that moment when there was Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, and others—and I’m like, this is the War of the Roses.
I’m always on Twitter—I never call it X—but I can’t seem to stop. It is still important and useful for many reasons.
From my point of view, a useful thing to a writer provides a buffet of unusual behavior that you can’t get otherwise.
All trolls.
Well, you get examples of pathologies that you wouldn’t encounter in your normal life, but on the other hand, and we stretch everyone’s imagination about what kind of people are there. This becomes more interesting and difficult when you think that people are not online anymore. A reader who picks up the book now will not, I think, have any doubts about the excessive behavior of the online character, which gives you too much room for absurdity in a way that does not correspond to the facts.
Why, quote-unquote, lose or reject such an attractive person to continue this work?
The obvious answer—that’s what I think. Being someone who has gone through a lot of rejection, and not finding a ton of books, in my mind, that really touch on that topic, or books that go beyond treating it as a short plot point, that was your goal.
What themes did you feel were important to remove?
In terms of how I connected it to the internet, one, it’s where people go to get answers often, especially answers to questions that are too embarrassing to ask in real life. They want people who have been through the same things. This used to be the primary function of literature.
Another thing is, when you’re lonely, especially when you’re lonely in a wounded way, it’s very tempting to be in a relationship that you can’t refuse. The internet is not closed. Unless you are somewhere without access, there is no place where you are prohibited from using it. It creates a zero-calorie form of communication that will soothe lonely people, at least temporarily. When you write about life in the present, it’s hard to avoid it.
Is loneliness one of the clearest signs of the present age?
No, loneliness has always been there. Paradoxically, our access to witnessing loneliness has increased dramatically. There is something in the fact that finding a place to go instead of meeting, rather than meeting in person, has contributed to that a little bit. Social media is solely responsible for producing it, it’s a little moral panic.
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