Rejection at the Jersey Shore

Here is my colorful thrift haul for summer, featuring not one, but TWO pairs of baggy pink capris; one pair even has rhinestones on the butt. Does this not make you want a square-tip French manicure with a wispy little design on the ring finger? If you’re a man, you should buy a cosmo for a woman dressed like this at a tiki bar (or at least play some Zara Larsson).

Presently I am sick. My whole house is sick. Even Mousse has diarrhea from the expensive DOG RESORT where we boarded him for the week. We left the beach a day early. Today I ate pho and drank a pressed juice with lemon and ginger and endured enough Ms. Rachel to drive a man to the edge. I ain’t a killer but don’t push me!

I haven’t really slept in three days. I’m tempted to pop a unisom and obliterate whatever chance tomorrow had of being a normal Monday back on the grind. I’ve only taken it once since getting the script and the next day felt like I was encased in jello. Gonna check my work schedule and see what we can get away with.

Last day on the deck of our big beachfront rental in Ocean City, New Jersey, watching the waves crash against an empty shoreline from a veil of hazy, blue-grey sky. Picking at these fresh whole wheat pita chips with lemon and olive oil that my in-laws brought from their local health food store, drinking a strawberry peach La Croix. Pausing now and then to take pictures of everything with my beloved Canon PowerShot SD-200. Digicam world, gentle world. Can’t stop looking at Frutiger Aero bathrooms. People are passionate about preserving the integrity of this aesthetic and I can’t say I blame them.

We’ve been in Ocean City since Saturday. We’re leaving this afternoon because Andrew’s sick. Until today, the weather had been too bleak for a true beach day, but I haven’t minded. I’ve just read and watched the ocean do its thing and followed playoff basketball without changing from pajamas.

My most recently completed book was Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. It took me something like three or four sessions and a few pages on my work commute, but fast readers could gobble it up in a day. Maybe I’ll persuade you to do just that.

ORIGIN STORY: A few months ago, I took to the town square (Substack Notes) for examples of contemporary transgressive literature. Breaking through the deadpan New York e-girl novel (complimentary) seemed an increasingly tall order, and I wasn’t in the mood to gaze upon my own banal, Tumblr-inflected neuroses, or be tucked into bed by some romantasyslop that doubles as a husband pillow. No, I wanted to shriek and squirm and be so mesmerized by the author’s leaky pathologies that I start researching psych grad programs. Show me you’re worth studying in a lab so I know it’s real. 😍

Rejection kept coming up. It’d been endorsed by people I follow and respect. But I totally forgot about it until last week when I checked my Kindle for the first time in ages. I’d pre-ordered Allie Rowbottom’s new novel and wanted to see if it landed in my library yet, and was recommended Rejection as “free with Kindle Unlimited.” I thought, hmmm, don’t recall ever getting Kindle Unlimited and hope that’s not something I’m PAYING FOR, but yes! Rejection it is!

Instead of the usual “a novel” or “stories,” the cover of Rejection says “fiction”—a decision I find both slay and useful. The book is a series of interconnected stories; characters are so cleverly positioned in each other’s worlds that when you encounter them down the line, it’s like, “you again, no way!”

Meanwhile, the reader is held hostage by Tulathimutte, whose chosen method of torture is force-feeding you the moldy bread of his mind. By the end you’re bloodshot and drooling, Stockholm Syndromed into thinking MOLDY BREAD GOOD. ME NEED MOLDY BREAD. It is an interesting book.

I don’t want to give anything away about the stories themselves. Each is a singularly demented experience, but if you cut them up, all the clippings would look familiar: performative male feminist, violent incel, pornsick gay Asian, QPOC Redditor with a million burners, Stanford hippies, girl who crashes out after one hookup with a friend, autistic tech entrepreneur, and, most crucially, the character we all know best: the lonely glow of an iPhone in a dark room. My husband bought me a physical copy of Rejection, and one day I saw it out of the corner of my eye and thought it was my phone. That’s when I knew I was in deep.

Sometimes I’m so in the world that I get FOMO for what happens online. The language expands overnight and jokes go over my head and it feels like coming home after a long trip to find someone changed the locks. I got that feeling reading Rejection. It’s not even that its shitposter adjacency made it tougher to read; it was almost like, because I did get all the references but never experienced them myself, I felt estranged from my friend, the Internet. Rejection final boss is when the book rejects you.