Broder chronicles her battle with sadness in an addictively wry voice that may inspire you to crawl into your own hole of self-aware self-hate and laugh at the cruel madness of it all from within ... to classify So Sad Today as the latest popular entry in a wave of confessional, feminist lit is to undersell its grander preoccupation with the horror and the humanity of the depressive mind. While Broder aligns herself with and agonizes over distinctly female issues, her gendered angst and healthy righteousness routinely collapse into the extremities of her mercurial mental state ... reading Broder’s book is a reminder of how humor can spring organically from darkness—not as a result of sadness but in spite of it—and Broder is unusually gifted at harnessing its defensive power.
[So Sad Today] is just her own experience, her own neuroses, her own fears. It’s all me, me, me, and, my god, it’s beautiful ... This book is a reminder that you’re not alone. Cry with Broder. Let it out. She is here for you.
If So Sad Today attempts to preserve the essence of the Twitter account, it also adheres to the more straightforward conventions of memoir. Where @SoSadToday was the device of a universal sad girl, the book conveys the experiences of a single struggling woman ... Like her Twitter feed, Broder’s essays often left me with a sharp sense of feminine recognition. I would read her accounts of heartbreak, sexual dissatisfaction, and alienation and think, Same—the solitary reader’s equivalent of a fave or a retweet. But recognition is not the same as deep connection, and Broder’s preëmptively dismissive sense of humor just as often acted as a barrier keeping me out.
Broder is often at her most potent when she’s exploring the pressure to be a 'good' feminist in the midst of our culture’s external-turned-internal pressures to stay thin, likable, and fuckable ... Broder is, all told, a better poet than essayist. Not every piece can sustain that sharp, stinging tone of her tweets, and a few of them just fall flat, and then revel a little too much in their flatness, like Tao Lin at his most irritating. But the collection’s last two pieces are stunning in a way that actually captures that 'primal' quality Broder said she saves for her poems. The first is about her husband’s struggle with a chronic illness and the difficulties and joys of creating an untraditional marriage. The last, perhaps the most powerful, is about her sobriety and her decision to immerse herself in—and even parody—the unpleasant emotions she’d spent most of her life running away from.
Through her extreme confessions, Broder wants to offer her readers the same thing she herself is seeking: the chance to confess one’s most loathsome truths and receive love in return ... The things that made Broder 'good at twitter,' are often the least interesting in prose. When our emotions become memes, not just performed, but performable in a way that’s already laid out in pre-ordained steps, our ability to jolt readers into empathy is diluted ... Broder’s writing is most effective when it departs from the twitter account and follows the dictates of traditional memoir writing.
