Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection might be one of the most disgusting books I’ve read, but it’s also one of the funniest. His skewering portrayal of losers rejected by society or romantic partners includes Kant, a repressed gay man whose fetishes are taken to their extreme, Alison, whose affirmation-forward group chat turns on her at a moment’s notice, Craig, a woke-maxing feminist whose ‘READ MORE WOMEN’ tote bags and Twitter activism hinder his sex life, and Tulathimutte himself. Nearly every page is filled with an internet reference or cut that, while obviously poking fun at people like a tech-savvy biohacker who has plans to procreate exponentially, suggest a reverence or empathy for the down-trodden, the desperate, and the embarrassing. Tulathimutte speaks to the loser in all of us, and Rejection is a scarily accurate and wickedly funny depiction of the ridiculous hurdles we have to get by in order to live.

Our Culture sat down with Tony Tulathimutte to chat about satire, self-repression, and the question of authorship.

Congratulations on your new novel! How does it feel so close to being out? 

This is kind of a hard book, in any way, to feel triumphalist about. Even though I think I did my job with [the stories], they’re all, in so many ways, mortifying. Mortifying to write, to research, to have read. I’m mostly waiting with curiosity and trepidation as to how exactly it’s going to hit people.

There are stories in here that were published elsewhere prior to the book — I was wondering if you consciously wanted to write around the theme of rejection, or these were the types of stories that were coming out.

I always had conceived of it as a book; I started it in 2011 and had written a suite of vignettes that, later, in radically different forms, became the first three stories. I knew they were all going to be themed around rejection, I even knew it would be called Rejection, which is strange for me, because I usually struggle with titles. I put that on hold for a while because I was working on Private Citizens, and all the associated promo stuff around 2017, which is when I took this back up with a bunch of other stuff, until 2018 when my agent cracked the whip on me and told me to finish a book. A mere six years later, I had the book finished. 

I think you use time really interestingly in the stories — some take place over 30 or so years. One character brushes over a rejection, saying it was “a billion years ago,” but you write that “to her it does not feel like a billion years ago; it feels like right now.” Did you want to collapse time in these quick narratives to make the rejection feel more urgent?

Yeah, one really nice thing about short stories is that they’re incredibly plastic when it comes to time. Technically, you can speed things up and slow them down in a novel, but you’re usually doing it for pacing reasons. With a story, you can take the whole thing and squish and stretch and deform it in all these neat ways. I wanted to play with this contrast with the first story taking place over 35 years, and the second, just over one year. As it goes on, the frame of time in the different stories — there’s one where a guy is projecting 120 years into the future when his progeny has numbered in the billions. I think it’s partly a change of pace within stories, and partly, I wanted the scope of the book to be quite large, but for it not to feel impersonal. So there had to be parts where I slowed down and took a more considered approach. 

In “The Feminist,” a narrow-shouldered man is radicalized by his continuous rejection by girls, even though he has committed himself to inclusivity and an unshakeable “wokeness.” Why did you want to satirize something that ostensibly happens often?

It actually doesn’t happen all that often in real life, to see a situation in which somebody who is a staunch and avowed feminist becomes one of these archetypal mass shooters. The trick of the story is to take two familiar archetypes that seem diametrically opposed and to link them together. You have this try-hard male feminist break bad and become a bogeyman incel. But it’s different from the conventional narrative behind that, because even up until the very end, he considers himself an unimpeachable feminist, even as he shoots up a restaurant. I don’t think the story would have been interesting if I was satirizing something that arrived pre-satirized. I did my little twist on it by, I guess you would say, doing a double satire.

I’m glad you correctly identified it as satire, because I think in the past, when I’ve written satire, people don’t take it as such, but when I don’t write satire, people call it so. This seems to be one of those rare moments when it lines up.

As a satire writer and reader, I feel like everything is satire. I don’t know, it’s like your own take on the world.

I mean, they say that satire is impossible these days because everything is so absurd. That’s not really true, but it is hard to make a more exaggerated point than reality makes these days. But exaggeration is not the only tool in the satire box. You can also make things sort of strange, and familiarize them in ways that underscore their absurdity. I think that’s partly why I picked something like [the protagonist of “The Feminist”] having narrow shoulders. I got the idea because a friend of mine was complaining about it, and I’ve never even heard of this insecurity before. ‘What if this person makes it a master narrative of his life, why he ontologically will never be happy, can never have what he wants and turns to despair?’ The boutique insecurity I picked out for him is a placeholder. Even though it’s less common, it’s equally absurd as getting hung up over your height or dick size or whatever. Things that are more common for guys to dwell on. 

I really found the sexual shame in “Ahegao” striking and frightening — it’s about Kant, whose repression of his desires stifles his sex with his boyfriend. There’s this wonderfully awkward scene where they’re talking about how to satisfy each other, but Kant’s anxiety can’t let him be honest. What was it like writing this situation?

This happens back to back with the end of the story where he’s writing out this fantasy in the form of a custom order porn video request form. Putting them together like that was to underscore the difficulty he has communicating his desire to somebody with the best of intentions, who has no reason to be judgemental, is being actively solicitous and open-minded, but he still can’t do it. It’s too mortifying, precisely because it might mean something. It might show him something about himself — that’s the nature of repression in all forms. ‘If I make this a real thing that is known about me socially, then it’s real and I have to deal with it and all the attendant shame and embarrassment around it.’ Whereas through the anonymity of this monetary transaction over the internet in the form of an exquisite fantasy that is physically impossible to carry out, there is an insulating safety to it. His failure to articulate [in person] what he is later able to for the video is necessary for making that point about how hard it is; It’s so painfully awkward that you can see why he’d be so reluctant to try at all. You can imagine him repressing and repressing it and hoping that the other person doesn’t bring it up indefinitely. Even though that’s no way to live. 

His request for the porn star was so absurd and ridiculous. Is it one of the stories you’re trepidatious about, hoping people won’t connect the character to you?

Yeah, I mean, it’s the kind of thing people naturally make assumptions about. People these days have difficulty even telling when things are fiction or nonfiction. I hear all the time, ‘I read your essay,’ when I write stories. This kind of anxiety of biographical readings is something I wrote into the book, when I explicitly insert myself as a meta-figure, and even a character at the end of the book. That story’s difficult for all kinds of reasons. Another thing is I had to write very deeply from the perspective of a gay character where his sexuality is not an incidental fact about him; it’s absolutely at the center of what is happening. And that’s something I had to work hard on, and is still something you can never be fully assured you got right. No one can give you that assurance and rubber stamp it and say, ‘You did a good job and everybody will say that this is a fair and accurate representation.’

Yeah, you mention the last story, “Re: Rejection,” an imagined response from publishers, which you then reveal to be from you, commenting on itself. Why did you want to go into this meta territory? 

I have like five different answers to that. I don’t know if I can do a good job conveying any of them. It all starts with the story “Main Character,” which is the first story that wades into metafiction. Oddly, I don’t really like metafiction, usually — it’s something that can be done very often in a hacky, gimmicky way. Breaking the fourth wall is not all that interesting or surprising anymore when you have Deadpool or Wolverine doing it. You have to have a particular reason to do it, to rehabilitate something that went out of fashion 30 years ago.

One of my reasons is that in “Main Character,” you have a story where authorship and who owns a narrative and who forms your identity — whether it’s something you can will yourself to have, and to have control over, or if it’s something that’s imposed on you by society or the people around you and by readers — this is at the center of what Bee is concerned with. To underscore that point, that character seems to have done everything possible in order to evade being pinned down via their identity, but it’s futile. You have the ‘Botkins,’ the fanatical forum-dwellers who are interpreting this character as something they may or may not be. I added, as a gag, this idea that the way people arrive at totally insane conspiratorial conclusions about people they see on the internet and create their own theory and lore about them, so I thought it would be funny to be, like, ‘Hang on. What if the person who wrote this character is… Tony Tulathimutte?’ Something that is actually the case, deadly obvious. But once you’ve committed to the fiction, it becomes strange again to consider. This character I’ve tried to make a real person and who I’ve made share a lot of things with me biographically… ‘What if they’re invented?’ And once the genie’s out of the bottle, it’s hard to go back to the kayfabe of conventional fiction, so I decided to go a couple steps further with the next two pieces.

Yeah, let’s talk about Bee’s story, an admission from an internet user who basically catalyzed the hypotheses behind “Dead Internet Theory,” whose numerous fake accounts picked fights with each other. Bee resists categorization, and they write, “Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality.” What did you want to explore with this character?

It’s something I’ve gone into with Private Citizens as well — in my real life, I have a much more measured take on [categorization], and I can see why it’s useful, fulfilling, and accurate. Saying  ‘I’m a Millennial middle-class leftist’ distills a lot of information. Taken to an extreme, these are terms that can be used to avoid forming your own personality or identity, if you’re doing nothing but leaning on prefabricated beliefs and ideas about how a certain type of person behaves or looks. In Bee, we have a lot less tolerance in their critique of that stuff. We can see that in their life experience, why that would be — in every step of the way, identity has been nothing but a liability for them. 

Their internet hijinks involve one-upping their fake accounts against each other with allegations of sexualizing children, domestic abuse, and fanfiction. At the end, Bee writes, “Now why am I rehashing years-old Twitter wank? Because, first and most importantly, lol.” It really does put into perspective how ridiculous the online discourse is, and yet we still put up with it.

Yeah, the point you’re cleverly making I think is that Bee is not just driven by a vendetta; they actually like being online. You wouldn’t commit that hard if in some way you weren’t erotically stimulated by all of the stuff that happens, no matter if it’s also annoying, frustrating, or makes you feel bleak about humanity. There’s a saying from a painter or someone who said ‘I got into painting because I like the smell of paint.’ In this case, Bee is someone who likes the smell of the internet, partly because it’s a place where they have a morbid arsenal to push back on this perceived tyranny of identity they’re railing against. And partly because there’s a lot of stuff that’s fun and enjoyable about the internet.

Speaking of, you pull from a lot of niche corners of internet culture here, and unfortunately, I recognized almost all of it. Did you ever worry that the book could be too “terminally online” for people, and to maybe dial the references back?

No. It wasn’t really a conscious choice either way. I’ve said this before, can’t remember to whom, but Private Citizens was very much a novel of place — it’s set in San Francisco, it has things that are particular to that locale. I wanted to go the opposite direction and lightly anonymize the stories in [Rejection]. A lot of places are never named at all, and it’s probably more accurate to say it takes place on the internet. As a result, for the sake of writing in a naturalistic mode, you’re going to be using that language. I’m not pro or con, I don’t believe that using internet argot is a sign of brain rot or anything, it’s just how language works. You get people together, they develop a lingua franca. The skill you have in deploying it is sort of the coin of the realm. It makes [you] identifiable as a member of this community. But of course, that’s the opposite of how Max in [“Our Dope Future”] uses it. He can only see that people use it — he has no feeling for language and tosses slang terms from multiple different communities in, and that’s the overarching gag of that story. And that’s the real brain rot. Not really thinking about the broader connotations of the language he’s using, just doing it to signal trendiness or connection to other people that he fails at.

I thought the groupchat dynamic in “Pics” was so interesting — all of these girlfriends are using therapy-speak to affirm Alison in her dating mishaps, but after she lashes out about her problems, it feels like she’s the only one being ‘real,’ in a way. What inspired these relationships?

The form of the group chat is really important there. It’s a perfect example of if you don’t have an existing relationship with the people in your group chat already, of these bonds that are easily formed and just as easily dissolved, that can bring you a feeling of community and camaraderie but it’s not a form that’s given to people doing anything but giving light commiseration. Of course, Alison is acting insane, and deserves almost all of the opprobrium she gets there, and moreover, is not savvy enough to play the game of keeping the tone light in a group chat. Even down to orthography — she capitalizes and punctuates her text messages, which makes her stick out. On the other hand, it is true that she’s obviously going through some kind of a crisis, and when you have a bunch of people who are not strongly connected to her, it becomes easier for them to dunk on her and dismiss her and eventually abandon her for another group chat without her in it. It’s a really depressing situation. There’s a point Bee makes in “Main Character” that the internet is not a community. In a real community, antagonisms have to be sustained and bonds are not easily dissolved. You can’t just unsubscribe from your neighbor, but you can on the internet.

I know you’re probably very busy with your workshops you run alongside of writing, but do you have any ideas of what to do next, any themes you’d like to explore?

Yeah, I’ve been working on a book of essays for a long time that no one wants to publish or read. I’m 70-80% done with it. I’m not in a hurry to publish it, it’s a very weird book. I’ll get to it when I get to it. It’s very much about authorship in a way that is sort of in conversion with the end parts of Rejection. Also, creepypastas. Remember those? I was like, ‘What if I could write essays in the form of creepypastas?’ What’s really fun about those is the implicit, is it fiction, is it nonfiction quality of those things, written to be uncanny. It’s addressing me, it’s telling me if I don’t send this email to someone else, I’m going to die. It does everything it can to spook you. So that’s the thrust of that book. And I’m working on a novel and I have no fucking idea what I’m doing with it yet. I don’t know what it’s about, I just have a mess of a Notes app file.

Rejection is out now.