Megan Boyle had me at first line: “i could never be a sports writer, unless my assignment was to write ‘sports sports sports sports sports’ for three pages.” (Mere days ago, I essentially said the very same thing.) At the heart of Boyle’s selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, which recently hit shelves, this feeling of wow-weird-I-never-thought-anyone-else-thought-things-like-that-maybe-I’m-not-a-weirdo-afterall-LOL is omnipresent.
Post after post is filled with seemingly arbitrary anecdotes, observations and thoughts – well, perhaps only arbitrary to the untrained eye. Because for those of us who have learned and grown up in an age so centered on the digital and technological, the Internet has become much more like a limb we never knew we had but now cannot be without.
The Internet taught us that we have a voice that can be shared with potentially millions and billions of people, but even if our voice only reaches 10 people, or maybe even just one, that can be enough, too, as long as we’re being heard. In an interview with Thought Catalog, Boyle herself went so far as to say, “I’m glad my first book is a bunch of stuff I originally thought wasn’t good enough for anyone to see.” And that’s the beauty of the Internet, as well as why the stylistic choice of the book being separated into blog posts is so effective.
Each post easily contains at least one line that screams, “This is me!,” or at the very least, makes you chuckle or makes you think. selected… has a way with turning the reader on themselves, urging introspection. In entry 1.10.09, Boyle writes, “my blood pressure rises during the period after sending a text message, before receiving a response,” which is spot on. In entry 2.05.09, Boyle writes, “sometimes being with people is fun but other times it feels like i’m operating myself from a distance, telling myself i’m having a good time,” and I’m fairly certain we’ve all felt this way at one point or another.
Boyle brings on a solid case of the giggles when she writes things like in entry 1.26.09, “i wish i could hang out with lil wayne, but I feel like he doesn’t ‘hang out’ with girls, he mostly has sex with them. if we could just kick it and drink cough syrup and spit 16 bars it would be good.” And then there’s the entire post for 7.26.09, entitled “embarrassing moments,” in which memories consist of things like, “email from my dad saying he’s read ‘everyone’ I’ve had sex with’ (age 23),” which is a post in the book about – you guessed it – everyone she’s ever had sex with.
Overlying themes of selected… alternate between sex, anxiety, self-analysis and… Richard Yates. Yes, Richard Yates, the American novelist most well known for writing the book Revolutionary Road (1961), which was later turned into a feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. More surprisingly is that Yates tends to frequently appear as a pop culture reference in the works of other authors and filmmakers, such as in the title of Tao Lin’s novel Richard Yates (2010).
Speaking of Lin, it must be said that Boyle’s work reads much like Lin’s – in fact, the two are married. An accurate depiction of Richard Yates, as well as a general reflection on Lin as a writer, was given by James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces (2003): “Richard Yates is a moving, very funny, discomforting, and heartbreakingly life-affirming meditation on extremes—extreme alienation, extreme intimacy, extreme confusion, extreme expectations—that reads like a meticulously and lovingly crafted collaboration between a weirder Ernest Hemingway and a more philosophically-minded Jean Rhys.”
Boyle follows in Lin’s footsteps to a degree, in regards to the extremism, yet simplicity, of her content. Admittedly, her (and his) writing style may not be for everyone. Criticism abounds when anyone doing anything tries to do it differently, uniquely. But we must appreciate Boyle’s selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee for what it does tell us, not what it should tell us: The Internet has remarkably changed the way we look at the world around us and the way we look inwards at ourselves. A new perspective is never a bad thing.
