NO JUDGMENT

Deep thoughts on contemporary life from the author of the novel Fake Accounts.

Oyler’s debut novel was heavy on social commentary, interrogating such phenomena as Instagram and dating apps and the pressure to turn the self into a marketable product. In her second book, she explores similar themes. In “Embarrassment, Panic, Opprobrium, Job Loss, Etc.,” the author reflects on gossip as cultural currency by analyzing examples from her own life, the rise and fall of Gawker, and the #MeToo movement, among other subjects. This essay is not a puff piece; it’s more than 40 pages long, and it’s clearly the product of significant research and careful thought. It’s also absorbing and funny. While reflecting on her mother’s habit of sharing scandalous tidbits about Oyler’s friends when she was a child, the author suggests that her mom was trying to both connect with her daughter and provide cautionary tales. “She was also, of course, parenting unconsciously,” she writes, “setting me up to become, among other things, a woman who is interested (and proficient) enough in gossip that she wants to write a long essay about it.” A resonant piece titled “My Perfect Opinions” begins as a tale of Goodreads and revenge and turns into a wry history of the star rating system. “The story begins in 1792, when pretty much everyone in the English writer Mariana Starke’s family had tuberculosis,” she writes. The title, as Oyler explains in the introduction, is ironic. This is a writer with particular views, and she has plenty of interesting things to say about autofiction, spoilers, and life as an expatriate. Some readers have seen Oyler’s work in Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and the Believer, but all of the essays in this collection are published here for the first time.

A challenging and often eye-opening nonfiction debut.