Award-winning novelist and cultural critic Strobe Witherspoon interrogates his own profession. It goes terribly.
“Wildly entertaining …Sometimes sad and sometimes hilarious, Witherspoon’s timely metafictional novel explores the ways (mis)information can shape public discourse in the digital media age.” – Booklife by Publishers Weekly
”Strikingly original …an innovative literary experiment that supplies a thoughtful commentary on the ‘discourse virus’ of our age …Witherspoon tackles a broad spectrum of media, including comically scathing excerpts from tweets, podcasts, blogs, and even academic journals and also keenly exposes the ways in which Strobe, the character, is implicated in his own online assault, due to his obsessive attachment to public life.” – Kirkus Reviews
OOF explores the role of satire in a society lurching from one ridiculous crisis to the next, where media outlets rely on clicks to stay alive and everything is filtered through a lens of anger and misinformation.
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Strobe Witherspoon just sold his latest satirical novel for a lot of money. The book in question, FLOTUS: A Memoir, is a fictitious autobiography about a former first lady of the United States reflecting on years of misery at the hands of her much older POTUS husband. When a chapter is leaked in advance of the book’s publication, an Online Outrage Fiesta (OOF) ensues via mainstream news outlets, blogs, Twitter, troll farms, and everything in between. Witherspoon has his life placed under a microscope. Family secrets are exposed. Now, an anthology has been put together to document Witherspoon’s downfall—and settle the score.
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”an impressive achievement of unflinching honesty from a noteworthy talent, as resonant and relevant as it is entertaining …OOF tugs at the threads that connect American cynicism with radical extremism and weaves a character-rich tapestry of insight …Each voice, whether of a New Yorker journalist or an Internet influencer, is rendered with uncanny fidelity. Perhaps most masterful is that key events are not depicted but merely alluded to, allowing the text to provide an elegant framework for a more personal story painted almost invisibly in the negative space.”– BlueInk Review
Targeted Age Group:: 15-65
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
Our ability to reasonably discuss the issues of the day is deteriorating rapidly. Much of this is driven by a media ecosystem that incentivizes outrage, certainty, misinformation, and division. OOF is an irreverent meditation on this discourse virus.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
The characters of the Witherspoon family were born out of a fictional series of reviews that they posted on Strobe Witherspoon's first book, FURTL, a 2014 Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year Selection. Strobe Witherspoon, the main character, is an absurd rendition of the real thing. The rest of the characters are imagined pundits and public figures that would likely participate in this Online Outrage Fiesta.
Book Sample
The Curmudgeon’s Dilemma
By Jill Kowalczyk
The New Yorker
“Back in high school, I had what the Germans call backpfeifengesicht, otherwise known as ‘a face in search of a fist,’” Strobe Witherspoon tells me as we sit in the back of a Dunkin’ (formerly Dunkin’ Donuts) in Somerville, Massachusetts. This sounds like either a self-effacing way to say that other boys were preemptively putting him in his place—he was the perpetual new kid, son of a father who frequently moved for work—or an admission of being a young man whose disdain for others was difficult to conceal. Maybe it’s both; that seems to be a common conclusion when dealing with Witherspoon’s oft-told quips about his childhood.
Witherspoon is nothing if not contradictory. The foreign policy analyst, turned novelist, turned meme punching bag would like the readers of this profile to know that he is just an approachable doofus who likes to tell silly stories. Those stories, he will also tell you, just happen to be deeply distraught meditations on the human condition. His most recent novel, FLOTUS: A Memoir, continues this tradition.
FLOTUS set off a bidding war in the publishing industry and elevated Witherspoon’s profile to levels he seems to embrace, mock, and fear in equal turns. A lack of detail about FLOTUS mixed with increased attention to Witherspoon’s background has only served to fan the flames of internet speculation.
The results of this spike in all things Witherspoon are, by now, not surprising: threats to his physical well-being, calls for his arrest, and skyrocketing commercial demand for his writing. In learning more of Witherspoon’s story, I was hopeful that I could clear up some of the conjecture and inject a modicum of civility into this “Online Outrage Fiesta”—or OOF, in internet parlance.
Witherspoon himself does not always adhere to the rules of civility. He revels in his radical provocateur reputation, frequently augmenting it with his now-familiar caustic self-deprecation: “Don’t these people have anything better to do with their time than let some WASPy has-been ruffle their feathers? Can’t they just let me tell my stupid stories in peace?”
FLOTUS, as Witherspoon tells it, is “Just a fun story about a female immigrant who woke up one day as the wife of the President, told from her perspective.” Just as soon as he finishes that sentence, he transitions to loftier, more contradictory territory: “Not for nothing, it also dives headfirst into the festering wound of politics and identity in today’s America.”
Some wonder whether this is a perspective Witherspoon should be presenting. On the right and left, there are questions about Witherspoon’s political posturing. There have been complaints, particularly from the former President’s supporters, that Witherspoon is making light of a very dark time in recent American history, a time that does not lend itself to irreverent satire. But that also seems like the exact reason an author like Witherspoon would broach such an issue. Striking when the fire is hot is a critical component of any radical provocateur’s brand strategy.
For the former FLOTUS’s critics, Witherspoon’s efforts to casually humanize and normalize a profoundly polarizing figure—all while mocking that person’s immigrant experience—inspires similar rage.
Witherspoon won’t divulge much more about FLOTUS. At a book event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right as the FLOTUS criticism was starting to percolate, he told an interviewer: “I would prefer to let the book speak for itself,” before leaning back and surveying the crowd. His exasperated, unshaven smirk took on a more contemplative form. “I will say that I think it’s going to, I hope, show a side of my writing, my humanity, that people haven’t seen before.” The same smirk makes appearances throughout the three weeks I spend with him in the greater Boston area, researching this piece.
“This is just a satirical take on the overwrought memoir craze,” he tells me, “a criticism of the caricaturization of a person that few people really know, who just happens to be a female immigrant. I think I’m more than entitled to write about these things.”
Links to Purchase Print Books
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Links to Purchase eBooks – Click links for book samples and reviews
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