Lauren Oyler is one of the most prominent literary critics working today. She made her name, in the last few years, writing acid takedowns of lauded writers like Jia Tolentino, Sally Rooney, and Roxane Gay. In 2021, she published an autofictive novel, Fake Accounts, to both acclaim and scorn; the novel was reviewed almost everywhere, and Chris Rock told Esquire it was a book he was planning to read (or had read already.) Oyler’s criticism can be found in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books, and she was recently the subject of a Paris Review interview, one of the great old-world feathers in any writer’s cap. She grew up in West Virginia, graduated from Yale, and now lives in Berlin. Among certain literary-minded millenials and zoomers, she exists as a character, an idea, something to celebrate or loathe, depending on which social pond you swim in, whom you might know. My own view of Oyler is that she is talented but did not live up to her talent in Fake Accounts. The novel left me unmoved.
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