Darcie Wilder’s debut novel literally show me a healthy person doesn’t sit well. It’s 97 pages of full-throttle disclosure, complete with semi-obvious booze, cum, and heartbreak details, as well as less-obvious 9/11 jokes and quips about what it feels like to lose a parent. Taken piece by piece, it’s hundreds of bits of hard-to-stomach flash fiction. But as a whole, it’s a gritty, moving portrait of grief and the chaos it kicks off in people’s brains. When I spoke to Wilder on the phone and told her the book physically exhausted me, she said she likes to remind people who are reading it that they “really don’t have to finish it.” But it’s worth it to push through. (I’m saying this as a reader who took a nice, necessary subway nap right after putting it down.)
I’ve followed Wilder’s personal Twitter and her work at MTV News for quite a while, so I’ve seen parts of literally show me a healthy person before — in tweet form. Encountering them again feels like déjà vu in the best way, suddenly getting context for something that was previously just a joke to be retweeted.
sometimes brands start tweets with a period before an @ even tho there are so many fun emojis
— MTV News (@MTVNews) April 29, 2016
Wilder writes in the way people talk on the internet, but moving toward a point, instead of just filling the time and netting likes. literally show me a healthy person opens with a diatribe against Godiva Chocolate spam emails, a stellar paragraph about what it’s like to be alive and turn on your computer every morning. It immediately makes sense when she says “when i use emoticons like <3 and 🙁 instead of emojis it means i mean it more” or “hey what’s up youtubers welcome to my channel and this episode we’ll be throwing out my trash for the first time in three weeks.” Here we are, she’s saying, online again, and it’s not that smart or useful to act like as if it’s so far removed from everything else.
With that in mind, I asked Wilder to tell me about how this book came to be. We also talked about why Twitter is so beautiful and why it’s a total nightmare.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Some of the one-liners in the book are things you’ve tweeted before. Do you think people who follow your Twitter account will have a different experience reading the book?
i still use twitter because we all need to devote our lives to at least one thing that wants us dead
— darcie wilder (@333333333433333) March 9, 2017
The two are pretty different forms. There’s some crossover, but the way the book functions is like a piece of art, and Twitter is in spurts. Everyone’s 140-character lines are mixed in with everyone else’s stuff. I think a book is a work of art that communicates something intentional, and the experience of reading it is so different from scrolling on the computer. It’s repurposed with different intention.
The sentence before something informs that one. The way you structure paragraphs is a completely different experience. And Twitter has a lot of baggage and occupies this crazy space in the world — I think it’s a crazy different experience.
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How did you decide when to bring pop culture references into the mix? There are a few in the book, but not compared to Twitter’s constant stream of them.
On Twitter, a lot of pop culture references seem like they’re going to be dated. They’re very timely and of a moment, and will expire. So I try to make [references] more timeless, or explain why it’s important in that moment, or just show the significance of them through the lyrics that are relevant, as opposed to using an artist’s career as a punchline. That artist’s career is going to change and fluctuate, and it’s not going to mean the same thing later, and that could not work. It could be really cool, in a way, but it’s hard to base your art around someone else’s persona. I don’t mean “timeless” like using the word “thou” or something. I like a lot of art from the ‘90s, and I feel like a lot of it is timeless in the way the feelings transcend time.
Since most of the book is such short pieces, and there are no chapters, how did you figure out the sequencing?
I played around with chapters, but then it really felt wrong. The book, in a lot of ways, is about a feeling of when you’re either caught off-guard, or you’re asked a question, and then there’s a hesitancy or a feeling of anxiety or just a stunned silence, and then a ramble. Initially, the book name was just a bunch of letters I slammed on a keyboard. I had to change it, because practically, that was unrealistic and unfair of me to make everyone deal with that. The letters ended up being the last line of the book, so very much, it’s just one whole thing.
Image: Tyrant Books To break it up, I think, would be against the point of the book, where that’s just all of these things, and you have to deal with it all. [You’re] just assaulted by line after line after line. It’s the way a brain works, where the brain just can’t turn off. I think it needed to be just one thing. And it’s a relatively short book.
There was a lot of shuffling. I started writing this basically in 2012. That’s when it started taking form. It took me a while to give myself the permission to have the structure, which is flash-fiction bits. A lot of the stuff had been written before, but figuring out where it is in a collage, or like a diary film, and figuring out the structure and the texture, was a lot of work. I had to [find] where themes would reoccur, space out stuff, and assemble it less like other pieces I had written, and more like when I used to edit film. I would edit a sequence and put it somewhere and figure out how it was going to read with callbacks to other scenes. There was a lot of shuffling, and then I would notice a hole where I needed a theme to come back, and I would write for that.
What kind of films did you make or hope to make?
I did narrative and documentary, but my heart was in the lyrical, experimental documentaries where I was cataloging a lot of things around me. I would pick a thing, for example one of them was “maps,” and then make something trying to investigate what a map is. But it would be informed by the things around me. It would be taking the scene and seeing where my life fit into it. It was a back-and-forth between what I was supposed to be doing, vs. what the footage I was recording was. It was a lot of reflection, and very personal and autobiographical, but also editorialized. I was definitely presenting things in a specific way. And I liked recording and finding archival stuff that I had tucked away. It was a pretty similar experience [to writing the book] — having an archive of material I had already made, and then stuff I had planned out, and stuff I made in response to those two working together.
Were you starting your Twitter account around the same time you were doing these projects?
Yeah, I guess so. I was in college. I think I started in 2010, but I don’t think I really had a sensibility for it for another few years, until I was out of college and worked on the form and started really interacting with it. A very big difference [between documentary film and social media] is that Twitter and social media are so much the infrastructure of an industry. When you change your Facebook status, it’s very different from making a work of art, even if you sell [that art]. It has a role in something like much wider. Then something that’s just a text document, I think, that’s intrinsically a personal work.
i thought i wanted a community of like-minded artists. then i found media twitter. and now i only wish for death
— darcie wilder (@333333333433333) March 29, 2017
How has Twitter changed for you since then?
Well, first of all [in 2010], I think I didn’t know how to live my life. It’s a different place now. Twitter changes — the temperature of it changes a lot, depending on who’s using it for what. It’s changed so much since the election, and in the past few years. There have been these wide migrations of how people use it. 2010 was the “live-tweet what you’re doing” age, and people were barely even using it for jokes. Now it’s evolved into something very different, and there’s a language about it. There are threads and quote-tweets.
I followed a lot of people for professional reasons, and that changed my timeline for the worse. Not my co-workers, but just people around New York, and then I got a flavor of the Twitter people always talk about. Right now, I’m a little sore about the whole thing, and I just like seeing what my friends are doing, mostly. I think my favorite Twitter account right now is @belatweets2u. She’s just, like, a teenager in Baton Rouge I think, and really vibrant and excited. She’s very funny, and not cynical or jaded.
Weird Twitter and Sad Twitter used to be separate, but now they’re the basic language of the way people generally talk on Twitter.
It’s hard. You can’t call someone out and say someone’s experience isn’t true and they’re not feeling anything, but I think you can tell when someone is either derivative or more hacky than others. And to some extent, everyone is a hack. It’s not a bad thing to be influenced by other people, but there are some things I’m tired of online.
