The Cut serialized fiction newsletter email

In the spirit of 19th- and 20th-century newspapers and literary magazines, Dinner Party, New York’s flagship newsletter written by Emily Gould, is introducing something new but also old: serialized fiction. The newsletter will roll out a new installment of “The Hater,” an original six-part story by novelist and critic Lauren Oyler, every Friday through October 30. It’s the story of a tall, self-absorbed, Berlin-dwelling writer named Lauren — a somewhat young, somewhat infamous writer — who has gotten herself in too deep with F., a frustrated academic turned book critic whom she met on Feeld and who is trying to cheat on his wife. Despite these red flags (and a few others), Lauren becomes obsessed. An IRL meetup looms, with possibly disastrous, possibly amorous consequences. An uproariously funny auto-fictional take on dating, parasocial relationships, and the corrupting influence of apps on our social lives, “The Hater” is guaranteed to provoke strong reactions. Read a preview of the six-part series' first installment and sign up for Dinner Party below to receive "The Hater" in your inbox every Friday. SIGN UP   Chapter 1: It Was My Birthday An ostensibly close friendship, the sex app for annoying people, two shots of amaro, then a twist. By Lauren Oyler Photo-illustration: New York Magazine A couple of years ago I had to stop talking to my friend Lauren, because she is a narcissist and a bitch. We’d been friends for a long time, about ten years. I guess that’s a long time. It was long enough for her to become a successful writer. Like many who find themselves so lucky, she changed. Everyone changes, of course, it’s a dooming sign of maladjustment to remain unchanged from age 24, but I believe it’s important to change in a positive direction. Her openness used to be compelling, and she is very entertaining. But I have come to realize that these initially attractive qualities can indicate deep, perhaps even bottomless, reserves of the shallow. Her reliance on irony as a defense mechanism can trick the weak-minded into thinking she is funny, thus her success. If the topic of her comes up, which it doesn’t often, our mutual friends unsettle themselves, and, after presenting what they seem to believe are requisite offerings of anodyne gossip, ask with flittering eyes if I am “doing okay.” Of course most of them would not be so shortsighted as to abandon an ostensibly close friendship with a successful writer. I just don’t care about things like that. What was the final straw? The final straw was made of paper: supposedly sustainable, in reality much too contemporary, profoundly irritating in the meantime. It was my birthday. My birthday is on September 11, and it depresses me. Not because of what happened on September 11, historically — of course it was very bad — but because time does not always pass in the way I’d prefer. I suppose September 11 is evidence that time does not always pass in the way one would prefer, historically. In any case it was a particularly troubled moment for me for reasons beyond the scope of this story, and beyond the scope of the activities of Al Qaeda. As a result I did not want to do anything on my birthday. I just wanted to sit quietly until it was over. Lauren knew well what was happening with me and insisted, in a group chat, that we go to a bar to celebrate anyway. This is her supposed generosity of spirit: conventional wisdom disguised as communitarianism. Depressed people are supposed to be made to go to the bar with their friends even if they don’t want to. I acquiesced. Lauren was late. This was not the problem. We live in Berlin. Everyone is late. I was even a little late. But the way she was late — she drew attention to her lateness. An hour and a half after we had agreed to meet, she came striding down the street, flushed with incident, breathing somehow ostentatiously. She sat heavily on the bench across from me and almost tipped it over, interrupting a conversation I was having