Editors who commission her, she says, tend to give her freedom in what she writes, perhaps because she’s suspicious of consensus. Oyler, 30, occupies a position both inside and outside the literary world: at its top tables, but not always enjoying the food. On Twitter, Tolentino commented that it had been “a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!” Oyler’s pitiless review crashed the London Review of Books website shortly after posting. Books she has covered include Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist Kristen Roupenian’s short-story collection, You Know You Want This (the much-hyped follow-up to her New Yorker story “Cat Person”) and, infamously, New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror. The sort of trouble you can get into reviewing books is pretty negligible, but on social media, where Oyler’s unsparing takedowns of books by popular authors are hotly discussed, dynamics of jealousy and adulation are heightened. She is speaking from a high-ceilinged, “not-New-York-sized” apartment she moved to in August to be near Cornell University, where her boyfriend is a fellow. The literary critic, whose work appears in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, is on Zoom from Ithaca, New York. “Whenever I write anything, I’m always afraid that I’m going to get in trouble somehow,” says Lauren Oyler.
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