In her podcast“eating alone in my car,” Melissa Broder is Everyone’s Sad Writer Friend
I can tell what kind of day I’m having by how completely I relate to Melissa Broder’s nervous musings on her dark, profound, and hilarious podcast eating alone in my car. If every sentence is a more eloquent version of a thought I’ve had that day, I know I need to eat some kale and be in bed by 10 p.m. If my inner peace is threatened by Broder worrying that she’s too broken for therapy, I elect to hold onto that peace and turn the show off.
But when you need her, she’s there. Even if it’s begrudgingly. After George Floyd’s May 25th murder sparked nationwide protests, Broder, like many White content creators, rightly elected to shut the fuck up for a few weeks. She returned for an episode called “golden grahams,” whose description is simply “i cancelled myself”. She opens that episode with “I know you all hate me. If any of you all have abandonment issues, I’m sorry.” After walking through her attempts to navigate silent complicity with adding another stupid take to the conversation, she goes on to address the toxic mixture of chronic depression with the guilt surrounding e-mails from listeners who missed her. She admits that she does not want to be there, and self-consciously notes “I’m only doing this for you..Does that sound, like, arrogant?” She then addresses the Golden Grahams of it all, snacks being both the motif of the podcast and a way to talk about lifelong food anxiety and the complex comforts of comfort food (the more processed, the better).
Melissa Broder is a poet and an author of essays and fiction, who rose to fame from her viral anonymous Twitter account, @sosadtoday. In the early days of that account, she worked in PR and fought off panic attacks. Now, as a beloved author, she writes of longing, the void, obsessive romantic attachment, and generally feeling untethered. She calls the podcast “bonus” content and barely markets it, which makes it feel like a sad, exclusive community. I sought it out as a fan who wanted to hear more from her, and what I found was a person whose neurotic and brilliant mind could keep me listening to a show that is clearly recorded on an iPhone while Broder is driving. She has a gift for burying morsels of genius in the middle of a rant about walking into Sephora, making listeners realize that existentially important decisions can be found just about anywhere you look. If all of this sounds depressing…I mean, I guess it is, but I find comfort, community, and even hope in hearing the deep vulnerability of an author I respect so deeply. Authors like Broder — Halle Butler, Jade Sharma, and Otessa Moshfegh come to mind — give us beautiful and relatable descriptions of general anxiety, of being a woman, of negative self-talk. And sometimes that’s what we need. Sometimes one of the mind’s darkest manifestations is the insistence that we are uniquely awful, lazy, grotesque. But then, Melissa Broder talks about the anticipated e-mail that will undoubtedly control her emotional state for the rest of the day, and that inner voice harping on our unique awfulness suddenly has no ground to stand on. It’s moments like these that make me click play, and that will make me a listener for as long as Broder is willing to load up on espresso and gummy bears and talk about how self-conscious she felt when the CVS cashier judged her for not drinking more water.
eating alone in my car is available wherever you listen to podcasts (probably. I just checked Apple and Spotify).
