How to Manage A Life-Long Addiction to Posting Shit Online

or: how i became a goodreads power user

My biggest strength and weakness is that I am a poster. I like to post things. Like you, I started entering chat rooms for married people when I was eleven years old, and I have not stopped chasing the high since. I think chat rooms are to millennials what Elvis Presley was to teens in the 1950s. Both were a meeting place for adolescent community and the desire you didn’t know you had. Both scared the shit out of parents. Forrest Gump is a movie about baby boomers and begins with Elvis. If it were a movie about millennials, it would start with a chat room.

I have DONE things, you know? I have travelled the world. I have met Richard E Grant. I have washed my ass in a bidet. None of those things remotely compare to telling a married man on a chat room that I was a bored army wife living in Nevada. Nothing beats the electricity of informing a fellow user of guitartabs.cc/forum/discussion that I was writing to him from the shared computer at the rehab facility I was currently in for my heroin addiction. I recently listened to the Shameless podcast series on Belle Gibson, the health influencer who told the world she was curing her own cancer by eating blueberries, when she did not, in fact, have cancer. I have listened to several Belle Gibson-related podcasts over the years and every time I shiver. There but for the grace of god, go I. Not that I’m necessarily capable of Belle’s level of deceit, but that I understand how good it must have felt when it was going well. Posting stuff online is fun; posting mad, made-up shit is even funner.

I grew out of lying, but I have never grown out of posting. Stuffing a glass bottle full of my own thoughts, and throwing it into the ocean. Hiding behind a rock as the bottle washes up on the beach, and watching people take the scroll out. I see almost everything I do as an extension of posting. Podcasting is posting. Publishing a novel is posting. I’m not joking here, or at least I don’t think I am. I know writers who write thousands and thousands of private words for their own personal expression, or therapy, or catharsis. Whichever. I don’t really know why they do it because I have never in my life done this. Even if I end up deleting an entire book and nobody ever reads it – which I have done! – I still wrote every word with the intention of posting them.

Posters are not often kindly depicted in the media. Much is made of the dopamine rush, and the likes ticking upwards, and the high of the follower count increasing. I don’t vibe with this. This is not my truth, as a poster. I don’t think I’m posting for validation so much as I am posting for the release of getting a thought out of my skull, and finding a tangible home for it. A home I can then access later, when I do more posts. Then why not post to a private account that no one can see, Caroline? I don’t know, man. I don’t know.

The only media that captures the essence of being a poster is Emily in Paris. Through the course of the first series (I have only seen the first series because Jen and I are watching it together, in slow dribs) we see Emily’s Instagram follower count rocket upwards in response to her dogshit posts. And while other people notice her social media presence increasing, Emily herself has no interest in how many likes or follows she has. She doesn’t really comment on it, nor is she truly courting it. Girlfriend just likes to post. When Emily’s boss Sylvia tells her to delete her Instagram, Emily obeys, and takes her phone for one last night on the town. An orgy of posting.

My lifelong practice of posting has obviously been extremely helpful in starting and maintaining a creative career. But the worm turns eventually, even if it’s only in your own mind. I post something – a podcast, or a newsletter, or an Instagram story – and I either get bogged down in the app itself or by my own psyche. I tell myself that it’s unseemly, as a novelist and as a married woman in her thirties, to seek this kind of attention. Leave it to the kids, y’know? I tell myself that I will never be considered a serious literary mind if I shitpost about The Emperor’s New Groove all day.

On top of all that: it’s time consuming. There’s no such thing as spending five minutes on Instagram. So I delete it, sometimes for months at a time, and while my mind is clearer and my sleep is deeper, I still feel the itch. I’m also not doing the podcast at the moment, so I’m not getting that fix either.

This is how I have come to be a Goodreads power user.

The thing about Goodreads is that ideally, if you want to post about a book, you have to read the book first. Like you, I love to read, and also like you, I never feel like I’m doing enough of it. So now my new rule is that reading 1 book = 1 post. It’s a very nice little reward system for me. Would I rather be posting monologues to TikTok, telling you about everything I’ve eaten today? Of course. But this is nice, and it helps my “community”, which is to say, it helps other posters. Posters who sometimes put their posts into books, but posters all the same.

To play us off: here are some things I reviewed and liked on Goodreads lately. My rule is that I only give five star reviews because I am NOT about to wreck another author’s day by lowering their Goodreads grade point average. Other people can do that, but not authors.

And Then? And Then? What Else?: A Writer's Life by Daniel Handler

I never read memoirs. The idea of a memoir about being a writer, i.e., a job I already have, makes me want to yak. But this was really transcendent to me. I underlined everything. Don’t ask me to type it all out again here. This book won’t be for everyone, but it was for me, and I’m grateful it exists.

Inanna by Emily H Wilson

This book is unbearably slept on! I lose SLEEP over how many people are sleeping on this book! My only explanation for why it isn't more famous is that it's the perfect mix of historical fiction and fantasy; not quite YA, but could be adored by a really smart teen. Maybe the genre blend makes it too hard to market. I don't know. But what I DO know is that in a world where so many fantasy titles feel retro-fitted to cater to algorithmic trends that readers have already moved on from, we need to champion original, exciting, sexy, funny, ambitious storytelling.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

I’m so glad that culturally we’ve grown past “everyone who has a big fancy wedding is a moron” and instead are growing into “big fancy weddings are community events that can cure depression and save lives”.

All Fours by Miranda July

I have simply never supported a character's choices more than when this woman decided to redecorate the motel room.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

You ever love a house so much that it ruined your entire life?