“These essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now.” —Roxane Gay, New York Times–bestselling author of Bad Feminist

From acclaimed poet and creator of the popular twitter account @SoSadToday comes a brutally honest collection of essays “at once devastating and delightful . . . as raw as it is funny” (Cosmopolitan).

Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn’t abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings, and which quickly gained a dedicated following. In So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter, grappling with sex, death, love low self-esteem, addiction, and the drama of waiting for the universe to text you back.

With insights as sharp as her humor, Broder explores—in prose that is both ballsy and beautiful, aggressively colloquial and achingly poetic—questions most of us are afraid to even acknowledge, let alone answer, in order to discover what it really means to be a person in this modern world.



“If her Twitter account is a darkly comic ‘creative way to distract myself and cope,’ . . . [Broder’s] essays are deeper excavations of that same mind.” —Elle

“[Broder] has a near-supernatural ability to not only lay bare her darkest secrets, but to festoon those secrets with jokes, subterfuge, deep shame, bravado, and poetic turns of phrase.” —New York Magazine

“Melissa Broder is undoubtedly one of the best essay stylists at work today.” —Ploughshares