The American writer continues to court controversy in her buzzy new book, No Judgement
“I think ‘why I’m right’ should be the subtext of any piece of critical writing,” states American novelist and journalist Lauren Oyler in her new book No Judgement. “Sometimes I become energised by a feeling that I need to right some discursive wrong being committed by my colleagues when they praise bad books or misunderstand good ones.”
Oyler, who came up as a blogger and ghostwriter, rose to become one of the few critics whose sly, provocative work has garnered enough attention that people have opinions about her. Oyler’s reputation has been staked upon a certain lofty I know better-ness, with a carefully-curated Twitter presence and infamous literary clout for carving up books others roundly praised, notably Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (in a literary coup, Oyler’s review of the latter crashed the London Review of Books’ website from feverish online traffic). She published her first novel, Fake Accounts, in 2021, and is presently working on her second one.
Her latest book, No Judgement, is composed of six long-form essays. It’s threaded through with references to cultural phenomena from Charli XCX to Truman Capote, Sheila Heti to Seth Rogen, William Wordsworth to Lydia Tár. She reckons with autofiction – her signature style – as a long-standing literary form, gossip as a lens, and vulnerability as a performance, amongst other topics. Speaking from the HQ of her bed in Berlin, we chatted about No Judgement, the function of criticism, and using outdated slang against one’s better instincts.
In the introduction, you state that the essays stem from ‘a growing agitation about what I perceived to be misunderstandings and fallacy… and a resulting feeling that I must say something to attempt to intervene, as futile an endeavour as that may be.’ What does it mean for something to be potentially futile, versus fruitful? Is creating a book like this a kind of crusade, or is it more personal deliverance? What were the intentions of where you started?
Lauren Oyler: I think the underlying question is: why am I telling you this? Or why do I write criticism? Those are not rhetorical questions [laughs]. They’re often genuine questions. That introduction is interrogating what I understand to be the not totally false sense of the critic as a kind of crusader for justice. You can’t think that your work particularly matters in terms of, like, changing the market, or changing what large groups of people want to read – but then I also think that that’s a bit of defeatist thinking. Why should the purpose only be an extreme capitalistic endeavour? Why should I say, ‘Oh, the thing I’m doing doesn’t matter because it’s not moving books’, as we say in the publishing industry.
A lot of what I write, particularly criticism, is in the hope of articulating something that maybe lots of people see, but haven’t really had the time or energy to think about. These essays in particular show the connections among lots of different things in a way that might help people understand what’s going on not just in literature, but in the media and in the broader culture. I think that that’s very satisfying, and it is a good thing in the way that having a local bar is a good thing. You’re providing something for a few people who like it and they come back, hopefully. But I don’t really know why I write criticism sometimes. Maybe the illusion of justice being served in some way is kind of a survival mechanism. It keeps you doing it and it keeps criticism alive – even if it does seem pointless at times or too much work for what you get out of it.
I was listening to a podcast about criticism – The Critic and Her Publics, hosted by Merve Emre – and the first guest was Andrea Long Chu, who talks about the idea of criticism as a form of flirting with someone who already likes you, as opposed to flirting to try to win someone over. Do you think of criticism as speaking to people who are already in your corner, or is there a conversion of someone who is not acutely engaged in these things?
Lauren Oyler: Obviously I want everyone to fall on their knees and be like, ‘this is the best criticism ever’. People who already like me, people who thought they hated me, Republicans, Democrats – everyone. I have to change the world and be the unifying force in American culture.
I guess I’d never really thought about it in terms of ‘who am I writing for’: people who already agree with me or people who don’t already agree with me. My pieces sometimes make people quite mad, in ways that I can anticipate and sometimes that I can’t. I like to see those responses, especially the ones where I’m like, ‘I had no idea somebody would get mad about that part’ [laughs]. It shows me something about how people are reading and how my work is functioning in the world. But I also like to write for the reader who is like, ‘you clarified for me what I didn’t really realise I was thinking’. Or, ‘I love that book, thank you for introducing me to it’. If you’re introducing someone to a book, you’re not necessarily converting them; you’re just doing service journalism. But I also hope that people can read my work and – even if they disagree with parts of it – find things that open their minds a bit or change the way they think about something. So I think it’s fun to flirt with all sorts of people [laughs]. It depends on who’s around.
In one essay, you talk about Sally Rooney’s reputation preceding her work, and how there’s this ‘Sally Rooney Awareness’ that shades her novels. I was wondering how ‘Lauren Oyler Awareness’ applies to your work. In other words, people who have read your novel and articles and will be engaging with No Judgement in a ‘knowing’ way.
Lauren Oyler: If I’m writing a review of a writer who has written seven books, hopefully I’ll have read those seven books, and discuss how they relate to each other. They’re definitely always going to relate to each other, right? That’s a truism of literary criticism, that a writer’s oeuvre has themes they return to, preoccupations. Often they don’t even know the sort of preoccupations that they have book to book. There’s something to be gained by reading someone’s work altogether, if they write fiction or poetry or critical essays: it’s always going to be interesting to see how their ideas spoken directly in nonfiction relate to what they’re doing, especially formally and stylistically in their fiction.
I think the question of awareness more broadly is a theme in the book: mass media awareness, or awareness of the relationship between reader-as-consumer and the author. The way that awareness is creating tensions, both online and offline, in how we think about these issues. You would think more knowledge is always better, more awareness is always better. But it can also often be elusive, or partial.
“I also hope that people can read my work and — even if they disagree with parts of it — find things that open their mind a bit or change the way they think about something” — Lauren Oyler
There was this line – a bit of a throwaway one – where you mentioned whenever something weird happens to you, ‘I put it in my ‘scenes for future novels file.’’ I wanted to hear about that file.
Lauren Oyler: Ever since I wrote the Harper’s piece on the Goop Cruise, I was doing reporting, so I was taking tons and tons of notes every day in a notebook, but I also would just put the date in an iPhone note and write down whatever I noticed throughout the day. Then I kept doing that every day after the Goop Cruise. It’s basically a journal, right? What I’m describing is a journal, but I don’t have the discipline to sit down and write in a journal every day. But I am addicted to my phone, so I do have productive things to do on it as opposed to scrolling through Instagram. I don’t have a literal scenes files, it was a joke. But I do have a lot of scenes in mind, some of which are things that have happened to me, some of which are things that I’ve heard about.
I noticed a few times you would throw in an expression and then comment on the use of the expression. One example was ‘it was not a good look, as we said a few years ago but don’t really say now’ or using the term ‘extremely online’ and commenting it’s a ‘dated phrase but apt’. I found that interesting: as you were deploying language, you were also remarking on where it stands in terms of how people use it, or if it isn’t resonant anymore.
Lauren Oyler: I hope that it comes across that I’m using those internet terms semi-ironically – but they come to you naturally in your thinking. If you’re a certain age, the slang from the time when you were in your twenties, the time when you’re using slang is just gonna come to you for the rest of your life. It’s going to feel natural to say even if you are a writer, and you have strong beliefs about the importance of not using clichés and speaking articulately and clearly, and not using meaningless slimy filler. But you’re walking around and you hear some gossip and you’re like, ‘Oh, that's not a good look’. So I wanted to demonstrate that impulse and what’s happening to language, demonstrate that that did come to me – but also I’m historicising it and demonstrating that horrible self-awareness that everybody hates. Being like, ‘I’m gonna do this thing that’s annoying, but I’m telling you it’s annoying, or I’m telling you it's dated. Therefore, you can’t chide me for it’.
On a different note, your essays offer a wide spectrum of cultural touchstones. On a pragmatic level, is that part of the note-taking that you’re doing? Were you extracting certain things as you were reading, or were you researching things as you were arriving at certain conclusions?
Lauren Oyler: It’s not natural to write six essays in a row, and it’s certainly not natural to research six essays at once. Obviously, the normal person would be like, ‘I’ll do one and I’ll finish it and I’ll do the next one’. I’m not capable of doing that, because I’m incredibly disorganised and need to be doing six things at once to make my life much more difficult. Also, I don’t really have a systematic note-taking process: I just have these really long Word docs that have quotes and references and links and half-written paragraphs and stuff not in any order whatsoever.
What really ended up producing the kind of style of reference that you’re talking about – which I found to be very fun and very freeing because I had done all this reading for all these different things and I could see how they all fit together – I could see quite nice resonances that I didn’t plan, but were just really delightful to find. I didn’t run away from it. I do two different Ben Lerner texts, I do two different Nabokov long readings, and I thought that it was just quite fun to be able to see how that came together quite naturally. I was like, ‘I can make all these weird references if I want to’. I don’t think that the high vs low register is so uncommon anymore. But I do think that some of my references are a bit unorthodox because I did not go to grad school, so I have no sort of ‘canon.’ I sort of read and watch very broadly. Which means there’s some weird stuff in there that you wouldn’t think about.
One example – not to sort of make me seem like a middle-brow TV watcher – is a Parks And Recreation episode. I always think about it and I was like, ‘this thing that I thought was funny for years and years that I say in my head all the time I can actually use’. So things that you have carried around with you in your soul can find representation on the page. If you’re making these sweeping arguments about what’s going on in the contemporary moment, you need to pull in a lot of stuff to prove your point.
No Judgement: On Being Critical by Lauren Oyler is published on March 7 by Virago.