Fuck me, I just wanted to exist without ordering the prix fixe, be more than an infinitesimal coordinate in a million-dimensional matrix of demographics—identity, and its convenient synergy with personal branding, the caricature of you it puts in other people’s heads. Suppose it’s true: this idea that your identity imbues you with membership, a kind of inborn sorority with inherited values and traits. Sounds nice. You’re less alone. You get a shorthand for your oppression that in certain quarters commands deference. It goes some way toward feeling less crazy to understand why it’s not your fault you’re treated like dogshit. But I hate having my life judged as the output of generic forces, that however I understand or react to them is secondary to the fact that I share them with others. Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality. Privilege discourse a well-meaning attempt to balance scales that has become tainted, like most things American, by the puritanical paradigm of original sin. Never mind that the loudest ones are always the ones trying to expunge their privilege or conceal their complicity—with reaction formation, Freud was right on the fucking money, I fear. This isn’t even mentioning the quirks and hobbies that have come to function as identities; not only the Marcusian stuff, not even anything as robust as astrology, but, like, fandoms, knitting, coffee. Pit bull owning. IBS! Come on.

I started with the alt account I’d been using for years, @MadonnaHaraway, and soon achieved the amount of lvl. 99 brain where you can look at or9hniffva13n\qd0j3nf and as;kk jfdnakdjasjdfwda and tell which one is misspelled. I developed a palate for content, the highest caliber being the shitpost—the kind whose only purpose is to make it so every few weeks until you die you’ll think “ear medication for my sick uncle” and go Heh. Saying nothing, revealing nothing. The shitpost is the opposite of self-expression, it is expression minus the self. Whereas sadposts and thirst traps, teleologically identical forms of validation-seeking, are driven by ego, as are opinions, those being (in my opinion) the dangling silk of the toreador. People who post takes, the ones who write articles or list college degrees in their bios or use their wedding photos as profile pics, are willing to endure universal hatred in exchange for the illusion that they matter, having subscribed to that corniest of ideals, the online agora. Inevitably they get what’s coming to them. The only thing worse than opinions is facts.

Now why am I rehashing years-old Twitter wank? Because, first and most importantly, lol. But also, I was behind the whole thing. I generated the profile pics, I made the Pornhub accounts, I wrote the fanfic, I hired the actor who streamed as Chumpa. I wrote many of the outrageous takes about the incidents, and I deleted many of them, and I screenshot and posted the deletions, since the easiest way to get people online to do your bidding for free is to make them think they’re forbidden to. And this was just a single op, lasting about four months; I usually had four or five going at once. Every post and account, all of it, me. Though the discourse it spawned, the recurrences of The Cancer, that was you.

Let us explain. Throughout our reading we noticed an interesting trajectory in your protagonists’ relation to you, the author. We have a straight white male, a straight white woman, a gay Thai American man, a wealthy white man, and a person of undecidable identity. We’re not questioning your right to write from these perspectives; the problem isn’t appropriation, it’s candor. Not that such a scale really exists, but one could roughly plot these stories along an axis of increasing marginalization, the idea presumably being to consider the theme of rejection from different perspectives. Viewed less charitably, it could be read as a way to head off certain dreaded allegations of self-pity and navel-gazing; an attempt at misdirection, as you smuggle your own hang-ups into theirs, while scoring brownie points for imaginative empathy. However, we believe that these distancing attempts only end up drawing attention to you, in a way that feels embarrassingly unintentional. (Our speculations about your authorial intent might strike you as unfair and out-of-bounds, but this isn’t lit crit, it’s feedback. Fair or not, readers do think about this stuff, and as much as it seems you’d like to control the book’s context, no writer truly gets that luxury, even while alive.)

We don’t really know what “Sixteen Metaphors” is even doing in the book at all, except perhaps to bewilderingly underscore the futility of the book’s central metaphor. So we pass over it to conclude at this letter, “Re: Rejection,” a ventriloquist act where you voice your misgivings about the book through a fictional jury of scowling publishers. This to us, for obvious reasons, seemed the most bizarre and pointless flourish of all: arriving shortly after a novella that ends with a metafictional self-commentary implicating the author, we hardly need more of the same. The only thing more boring, exhausted, and self-indulgent than breaking the fourth wall at the end of a story is pointing it out. Even looking past the internet-borne tendency for writers of your generation to ass-cover with tedious disclaimers, the real point, we think, is to foreclose scrutiny, to get ahead of rejection by naming your sins before any reader has a chance to. But this perverse apologizing only feels like you’re cutting and chewing our meat for us, and we reject you (literally) all the harder. What does it matter that we know you saw it coming? Is it high praise to say that a book is conscious of its faults? Given the subject matter, we’d think you might be keen to the futility of writing an unrejectable book; you cannot curb a reader’s reading, nor steer their goodwill, no matter how clean your intentions or nude your soul. To attempt it is to abandon the possibility of an authentic connection with the reader, one in which you put yourself on their level (though, we suppose, at least this way you get to do the rejecting). So this special pleading on your own behalf, by way of adversarial autofiction, is just, well, annoying. And you already did a similar thing in your first book too.