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'The Pisces' Review: Melissa Broder Proves that She Is the Voice of Our Dysfunctional Generation

Melissa Broder's debut novel 'The Pisces' is a poetic exploration of love, addiction and mental illness.

By Molly GreevesPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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Haven't heard of Melissa Broder? If you've managed to miss her four poetry collections and columns on Vice and Ellen, you may know her from @sosadtoday, the Twitter persona that has provided weirdly moving comments about depression and anxiety since 2012.

While it would be easy to dismiss @sosadtoday as another depression-meme account, Broder's work defends her authority to discuss these issues with over 800 thousand followers. Her debut novel, The Pisces, is a staggeringly beautiful modern tale about a woman who uses love to fill the void in her life. Lucy is a graduate student who, after ending her long-term relationship, moves to Venice Beach and falls in love with a merman named Theo.

If fantasy isn't your thing, don't be put off. Despite her lack of gills, Lucy's journey is easily the most interesting aspect of the novel. Unsure as to whether Theo is a psychosis-driven hallucination or a real-life being, the only thing that Lucy is sure of is that he is her only hope of happiness.

To call this a romance novel would be misleading. Broder doesn't make you root for Lucy and Theo as a couple; rather, their disturbing obsession with one another makes you question whether their "love" is really worth fighting for.

Initially, Theo being a merman was a flaw in the novel for me. Aside from offering such bizarre moments as Lucy taking him across the beach in a wheelbarrow and some more original sex scenes, I didn't think his being a merman really added anything to the story, and his scaly form was revealed too late in the novel for me to be on board. But while the fantasy element of this novel initially felt out of place, it became the perfect way for Broder to criticise the unconditional love that supernatural novels have celebrated for years. By viewing an impossibly good looking and mysterious creature as answer to the emptiness, Lucy neglects the real love that exists in her life. The merman becomes a perfect metaphor for the fantasy of love that, if pursued, can be destructive.

Lucy is often hard to like. But it’s hard to complain about that when I’m so sick of mentally ill characters being likeable all the time. Even if you hate Lucy, Broder makes it hard not to sympathise with her. Writing her thesis on the gaps in Sappho’s work, she attempts to fill the void in her own life left by her mother’s death and her sister’s absence. She finds comfort in Sappho’s work and the company of other women, but is afraid of this love, instead turning to crushes that are more satisfying to fantasise about than to actually be with.

“I craved that nurturing,” she reflects while buying lingerie with her friend Claire. “But I was afraid to ask women for it, afraid they would die or reject me in some other way. So I looked for it in men who could not give it.”

Lucy’s crushes provide a poor substitute to the real, pure love she could get from her sister, Dominic the dog, or the other women in her support group. In a culture that overemphasises romantic love as the ultimate aspiration, The Pisces champions platonic female love, encapsulating a time where women are beginning to see one another as sisters rather than rivals.

If you follow @sosadtoday on Twitter, the hilarity, honesty and relatability of this novel will be no surprise to you. The Pisces is, in the best way, quintessentially Broder; where else will you get a protagonist who contemplates the meaning of love while getting a U.T.I in a hotel bathroom? But even if you have never heard of Melissa Broder, if you enjoy dark fairy-tales, you suck at dating or you feel things with an uncomfortable intensity, this is the summer read for you.

literature
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About the Creator

Molly Greeves

Molly Greeves is a twenty-year-old student journalist from the UK who writes about social issues, pop-culture and art.

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