LITERALLY SHOW ME A HEALTHY PERSON - DARCIE WILDER

Perhaps the trendiest book I’ve read in a while. It’s got a distinctive cover and I do remember seeing it all around town (and by “all around town” I mean “in a handful of cool coffee shops”) a year or two ago when it came out. Also Kendall Jenner, who for a while the most interesting Kardashian (tho I think it’s back to Kim now that she’s made a place for herself as part of our judicial system), was recently spotted reading this book, which makes sense. This book is probably the best of the millennial (Wilder is young than me, born in ‘90, making her an apex millennial) internet books, or books that try to depict what being on the internet all day, and having done so for your whole life, feels. The particular tone people affect in texts and tweets and emails. I’d include a lot of miscellaneous internet writing in this camp, as well the work of Tao Lin, Megan Boyle, Mira Gonzalez, Kool A.D., Spencer Madsen, etc. Like these others Wilder’s book is largely without a narrative drive and is more a collection of themes and obsessions. Like many of the other authors in this genre, the book is broken up into small self-contained little segments/chapters that exist somewhere between tweet and micro-fiction. Like many other works in this genre it seeks to replicate the tone of the internet (or, if we want to get more technical, the tone of “weird twitter”) which is some combination of absurd, explicit and sad. Ideally all at the same time. Often these books contain fantastical or bizarre scenes (talking animals, superpowers, etc), tho LSMAHP is pretty grounded in the real world.  Like many books in this micro-genre, it’s hard to read it without assuming it is some sort of autobiography. And I think Wilder really nails it. It’s the correct length, 97 pages of what, again, are basically tweets, it feels like falling into an internet rabbit hole where you find someone new you like and go back and read all their tweets, it’s a very 21st century feeling. And, despite the loose structure, a story does emerge, we’re following a young woman (who one assumes is Darcie, tho that assumption is just based on the sense of familiarity encased in Twitter) as she navigates her life after his mother dies. But Darcie balances it perfectly. Not too much mom stuff to make this a traditional book, not too many jokes to make this a collections of funny tweets. She’s got both. Plus tons of cum talk. I had no idea there is a person who is not a 15 year-old boy so obsessed with cum. “What humanizes me more, tears or cum?” might be my favorite and most representative of the sections tho I also like, “how do they get the baby oil out of the baby?” Either way, excellent, deserves the praise it gets. 29 iphones covered in cum.