I've been going mental I'm losing my mind

because you're on and all of the time

I've been going mental but I'm feeling just fine.

Going mental all of the time.

I'm Eileen Kelly and you're listening to going mental.

On today's episode, I am joined by Melissa Broder. She is an author essayist and poet.

Her work includes the novels The Pisces, Milk Fed, and Death Valley, as well as the poetry collection Last Sext and the essay collection

So Sad Today, which was based on her anonymous Twitter feed, also titled So Sad Today, which has almost a million

followers. She's also written for the New York Times El Vogue and New York

magazines The Cut.

I am a Melissa Broder super fan,

and I'm so excited for you guys to listen to today's episode.

She received her bachelor's from Tufts University and has an MFA in

poetry. Welcome to going mental. I'm such a huge fan, so excited to have you here today.

Could you please introduce yourself for my listeners?

Yes, I'm Melissa Broder.

I'm the author of Death Valley, Milk Fed, and the Pisces, those are all novels, and then the collection of essays

so sad today, and five books of poems.

I love them all so much. You grew up in Pennsylvania.

I did. What was that like? What was your family like? Sure. So, you know, I think that wherever I had grown up, it might have been, I've always found it, I've always found reality and living in a body a challenging

experience so I think it's like not so much the where is the what but my mother was a teacher and my dad was a lawyer. I have a younger sister with whom I'm really close. We had rabbits, those were the only pets we had, Abigail and then Hamletlet and I went to an all-girls school for 13 years

which at the time I didn't love but actually looking back it was awesome and yeah I've always been sort of in flight from reality, had an escapist

...