WRITING when you’re never really alone
Olivia Sudjic, who’s never lived without the internet, explores how to write when you can’t ignore ‘potential hostile readers’ waiting
For writers, being able to retreat from the public eye and be alone with one’s thoughts — one’s spirit, one’s psyche — is crucial for creating art. But in the internet age, with a hostile audience everpresent, that sense of privacy has evaporated.
British author Olivia Sudjic knows this all too well. She navigates this discomfort in her brilliant new book, Exposure, an extended essay on writing, anxiety and feminism in the 21st century.
Sudjic’s career has been shaped by the internet. She rose to prominence in 2017, with her debut Sympathy, which the The New Republic called “the first great Instagram novel” and the Star described as “A dense debut novel of what can happen ... in a society where “unfollow” is the unkindest cut of all.” It’s about a lonely millennial who visits New York and fixates on a woman she encounters online, and it won widespread praise for its au current theme and masterful prose.
Her latest outing, Exposure, owes a debt to internet culture as well. The book is published by Peninsula Press, a new crowdfunded house. Paradoxically, Peninsula is giving authors back, via the web, the very thing the web has taken away: a feeling of solitude, and anonymity. Reached on the line in London, 29-year-old Sudjic tells the Star that writing for a fledgling alternative press gave her the privacy she’d been missing. Since her first novel came out, she says, “I don’t have that same feeling of writing into an anonymous, totally free space anymore,” she says.
But this project “gave me that back again,” since the editorial team was small, the process informal and the turnaround time quick. The stakes were relatively low.
Literary fame is a tricky thing in the age of anxiety. For Sudjic, such success had triggered a kind of paralysis. And so Exposure finds her on a self-directed writing residency in Brussels, holed up in a grand apartment, too stricken to go out, let alone put pen to paper. The stress she suffers is inexorably linked to our particular time, to what it feels like to be a writer in the internet age.
“I definitely think that I wrote this because I felt like the books I read and loved — the classics about how to write — those didn’t really feel true to the present moment,” Sudjic says.
“In lots of ways that can be a relief. Because when you read Stephen King ( On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft), or something like that, you feel like you are zooming out of the hyper-present, hyper-connected moment … I do feel like that (old feeling of ) anonymity (is) really difficult to access,” she says.
For those under 30, Sudjic says, the digital world feels inescapable. “Even if you don’t want to participate, all you are really doing is putting your head in the sand,” she explains, “which can generate its own forms of anxiety and paranoia of what you don’t know.” She wonders if it might be a bit easier for older generations, who haven’t grown up with the internet in the same way. Perhaps for them, being wired doesn’t feel as if it’s second nature, or unavoidable. Perhaps they feel as if they can either opt in or opt out — or at least access a mental state pre-internet. “Whereas I feel like it’s absolutely an extension of my body,” she says.
“My consciousness has really been shaped by it. It’s not that I have developed my writing voice, and then the internet happened. My writing voice has been developed by the internet. So, choosing to avoid it will only feel like a kind of artificial hiding, rather than an authentic switching to a different psychic place within me.”
In practical terms, this hyper-awareness of a “permanent audience” can erode “the space that needs to be private in order for something to happen.” In other words: it’s hard to get in touch with what we want to articulate when we sense the presence of an army of “potential hostile readers,” waiting to pounce. As we’ve seen in recent years, such fears are far from unfounded. Women writers are often judged quite harshly online, whether by literary critics or trolls.
Throughout Exposure, Sudjic thinks through the challenges of scrutiny and surveillance — where often women’s lives rather than their books are reviewed, as the Guardian put it. Sudjic argues that Giller-nominated author Rachel Cusk’s response was to turn to “autofiction,” or fictionalized autobiography, so that her work wouldn’t be so open to personal judgment. Meanwhile, Elena Ferrante, an Italian author writing under a pseudonym, has steadfastly refused to reveal her identity.
In the process, Sudjic manages to shed light not only on the experience of women in her cohort, but on the current moment as a whole, putting to words the bizarre hollowing out of the self that occurs when we are bombarded with wave after wave of digital detritus.
Smart, savvy, and soul-wrenching, the book nails the uniquely 21st century tension between erasure and exposure.
Since it came out in early November, Sudjic has received a flood of messages, from men and women, young and old, writers and not, all of whom who relate.
“Sometimes it’s the thing that you write in a matter of weeks — that you think probably only speaks to you, and doesn’t contain any universal truths — and that’s the thing that people end up really responding to,” she says.
“It’s given me a lot more confidence in my own writing voice,” she adds, “which is a really unexpected outcome.”