The book is a sharp, brilliant interrogation of the way we live now, our experiences continually filtered through a glowing, selfish lens. She is an insightful critic, and in Fake Accounts she turns that critical eye towards the anxious interior life of middle-class millennials. It’s not surprising that Lauren Oyler has managed to capture the neurotic spirit of a generation. Wow, it’s like she had personal access into my own thoughts. I didn’t realize Oyler wrote my diary, one user said.
Not only had Oyler seen the worst of me, she had apparently seen the worst of the whole world (or, at least, the world populated by middle-class white women with graduate degrees and Twitter addictions). A slew of retweets, coyly positioned photos of the book cover and shots of particularly cutting quotes were largely accompanied by “omg it me” captions. To qualify a novel in relation to how much it reminds you of yourself is an inherently narcissistic act, but a cursory Twitter search proved that I wasn’t alone. I was ashamed of the “selfish black thoughts” I shared with the protagonist, and increasingly certain that this discomfort was an intended reaction. I had been seen, caught in the headlights, and as I grimly read on, I felt as if I were looking at my own mugshot. In the abrasive exposition-as the narrator searches through her boyfriend’s phone as he sleeps, more out of a desire to be “righteously wronged” than out of genuine suspicion, punctuated by asides on her “embarrassingly expensive” skincare routine-I found my own twisted thought processes perfectly articulated. Like many other sort-of-young, Twitter-active women, my first reaction to Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts was a mingled sense of horror and relief.