When I begin reading Autumn in the Pain House, the debut poetry collection from anonymous Twitter poet John Doe published on Expat, women are tweeting I hope the male loneliness epidemic eats you maga scum alive. Men are tweeting your body, my choice. The epigraph of the book is a Jimmy Carter quote that reads The abuse of women and girls is the most pervasive and unaddressed human rights violation on earth.
John Doe cultivated an online following with sharp one-liners on Twitter, occasionally posting full stories that would go viral. The other day I sent my friend a text asking where the line is between artists and influencers; John Doe is a good case of someone who blurs that boundary. Because we’re mutuals, I respect him in some capacity, because if he follows me that means he has good taste. Yet there are some tweets he blasts off that feel utterly artless, like the oft-recycled “One weird girl is worth a thousand bitches,” which makes you wonder how many of his words are even his. Is John Doe a writer, or just a content machine?
This persona of a pathetic, self-loathing, evil man is not new; in high school, I obsessed over the thrilling apathy of Diary of an Oxygen Thief, an anonymously published 2006 bestseller whose first sentence reads I like hurting girls. Autumn in the Pain House is just Diary of an Oxygen Thief of the Twitter era. It’s very much needed now; everyone’s talking about the Male Loneliness Epidemic and wondering Where All The Young Male Novelists Have Gone.
In the book, which I have to assume is autofiction, John Doe is twenty-six and lives in Michigan. He’s courted by agents and his DMs are full of e-girls. He’s watching his tweets go viral as he deals with heartbreak, a drinking problem, and a serious case of Midwest suffering. The first thirty or so pages overflow with cringe brain-rot lingo: “Kill yourself, respectfully,” “Can’t post face, though, might get canceled,” “Marx wouldn’t want me to be this bitchless,” “One thing about me is I’m gonna lovebomb you like Nagasaki.” It’s generally what I expected upon ordering the book: A bunch of tweets stitched together (When I show the lines to my great friend Greta Schledorn, she replies it’s giving rupi kaur for men). I thought to myself, OK, I get what the rest of the book is going to be. Then, the prose became surprisingly beautiful and earnest and revelatory at times. He lights frogs on fire; he recites the Serenity Prayer while listening to Lil Wayne; he feels like “a dead deer on the side of the road that someone spray painted obscenities on”; he imagines taking his dead dog for a walk, the corpse dragging on the asphalt and leaving a trail of blood; he’s writing poems while driving because it’s “safer than drinking.” Some of my favorite lines:
And you are an angel. I came on your wings because I wanted them to get stuck and for you to never leave.
And I wanted to lie down in the snow and die and get on my knees and pull out a ring I didn’t have.
My sponsor said I don’t actually wanna kill myself I just wanna kill the part of me that’s in pain. But he has someone to hold at night and I have an urn filled with memories. When I can’t sleep at night I spread the ashes around my bed and close my eyes.
Sadly, what I cherish the most is probably not what people appreciate John Doe for. They appreciate him for random internet schizo babble, which does pop up in later pages, frustratingly shattering intimate trances: “Because now men like me can say Me Too,” “What would Hunter Biden do?” It’s telling that the passages he recently shared on social media were the ones with the most brain-rot, the most unimpressive parts of the book. A quote-tweet from @crisisauteur criticized the “incessant use of irony.” It’s interesting that toward the end of the book John Doe declares, “We don’t have to be ironic anymore. We don’t even have to be funny. When you say beautiful things people listen. And you don’t even have to be from New York.” I wish that were true, and I think he does, too.
There’s a quote from indie rock musician MJ Lenderman that comes to mind. His songs focus on pathetic men in their everyday struggles; about it, he told The Guardian, “When you’re observing someone at their lowest, certain truths come out.” Autumn in the Pain House dives into the depths of self-destruction and suffering, but the irony takes away from its power. There are plenty of moments where the humor works: “Ex boyfriend is a fucking slur. Never call me that again.” At one point, he compares himself to Drake and Conor Oberst in the same sentence. Even the incorporation of digital spaces has some good moments: “Tucked away are the visions of me stroking your angel wings while you played The Sims. And I remember how the silence sounded so sweet. The clicking of your mouse felt like a heartbeat. Our heartbeat.” Mostly, though, the Tweet-like lines and allusions to the Web feel like looking at your phone to avoid acknowledging your feelings. Of course there is some merit in that, of how it communicates the experience of being young today, how we’re searching for the divine one second and scrolling Instagram reels the next. But just like how it doesn’t feel good IRL, it doesn’t read very well either.
There are also some unfortunate references to the controversial author/tweeter Delicious Tacos, but I won’t get into that because I have been lucky enough to not know much about that side of the internet and I do not want that to change. The name-dropping feels hilariously obvious in its clout-chasing, not unlike when Sean Thor Conroe included an email from respected author Sheila Heti in his 2022 novel Fuccboi. But I digress. Either way, Autumn in the Pain House raises the question: Is alt-lit really dead like the Los Angeles Review of Books contemplated a few months ago, or is it just that everyone would rather tweet than write? Has everything become so hypercommodified that we can’t tell whether we’re making art or content anymore? Is it too difficult to be sincere in a landscape of constant absurdity?
At the very least, if you’re going to title your book Autumn in the Pain House, you have to let yourself feel the pain instead of wasting ink on AI-like sentences like “Pussy from a girl who can’t stand me” that make me feel nothing at all. The intense yearning, the struggle with alcoholism, and the rumination on why he writes poems are the mesmeric forces that push the book forward. His strength is in his willingness to be weak and submit to sincerity, but it would have more of an effect without the crutches.
Get Autumn in the Pain House here.
