Rejection is one of the most neurotic and innately human experiences that we share as a species: a crush unable to reciprocate your feelings; a rejection email from a company saying they’ve moved on with another candidate; a lit mag encouraging you to submit again in the future because your piece isn’t quite what they’re looking for right now.
Rejection is humiliating and self-destructive. And, for ambitious young college students navigating life’s uncertainties, it’s also an education. At once satirical, grotesque and emotional, “Rejection” by Tony Tulathimuttee explores what it means to be rejected — by lovers, friends, society, even oneself. I came out of this reading experience feeling disturbed and exposed to the bone.
“At once satirical, grotesque and emotional, “Rejection” by Tony Tulathimuttee explores what it means to be rejected — by lovers, friends, society, even oneself. I came out of this reading experience feeling disturbed and exposed to the bone.”
Published in 2024, the collection features lots of terrible sex, unflattering encounters, riffs on millennial internet culture and dramatic irony. Tulathimutte’s protagonists have so little self-awareness and make such bad decisions that you’ll want to reach through the page to shake them awake.
They’re caricatures of people you’ve likely come across, real and fictional, a chorus of society’s most alienated and touch-starved. A self-proclaimed male “feminist” who spirals into the red-pilled, incel-infested internet manosphere after countless rejections by women; a white woman whose best friend’s rejection leads to self-sabotage and obsession; an unsociable “moon-faced pornsick Asian virgin in his 30s” whose graphic and elaborate sexual fantasies end in a life-upending mistake.
The book opens with “The Feminist,” which follows a narrow-shouldered, mediocre white dude — the archetypal “nice guy.” In Clavicular looksmaxxing fashion, he’s obsessed with proving and aestheticizing his masculinity, and the number of references to his shoulders in this story is strikingly comical. When yet another one of his friends rejects him, he asks if it’s partly because of his shoulders. On his dating profile, he crops his shoulders out of each picture; his bio reads: “Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan … I can usually be found haunting the bookstores and bakeshops of our fair burgh, when I’m not dismantling the imperialist male supremacist hetero patriarchy.”
I started thinking about the countless internet memes of chronically online men with #prochoice #leftist in their Tinder bios or “feminist (6’3)” in their Instagram bios, the parenthetical a qualifier of their social goodness.
The scariest, most ironic part is that by the end of the story, as he turns into a mass shooter, he still believes that he’s a true feminist. That no one understands his ultra-enlightened, intellectually superior brand of feminism. That everyone else, including women, has it wrong.
Another story, “Pics,” follows a woman who hooks up with her best friend and develops obsessive, unrequited feelings. Alison posts cryptic song lyrics on social media in hopes of getting his attention; she curates an “ick list” on her notes app to get over him; she describes his new girlfriend as a “hairless Asian child bride” to look down on his dating life; she agonizes over writing him a post-rejection text to prove she isn’t bothered.
Alison continuously digs herself into a hole of self-destruction and becomes paranoid that no one likes her. And she’s right — not even her own friends do. Her frustrations with heartbreak are familiar. Her reactions to rejection, while grim and distasteful, hit closer to home than readers might want to admit.
Alison is what you’d get if you took the protagonist of “Fleabag” and stripped her of all self-awareness. Both characters crave intimacy while actively self-sabotaging their human relationships, and leverage performance and wit to shield themselves from vulnerability. But while Fleabag internalizes her guilt and shame, Alison projects it onto the people around her.
I was reminded of this famous line from the first episode of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s show: “I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.” Fleabag knows, deep down, that she’s an insufferable person; Alison does not. Or maybe we just don’t get enough of her in the story to tell where she’ll go next.
The rest of the collection is a series of satellite stories of rejection. The last section, “Re: Rejection,” is a metafictional letter in which a publisher rejects the book the reader has in their very hands. In the letter, Tulathimutte anticipates the criticism he expects to receive about the book and deliberately distances himself from each unlikable character. It’s almost as if he’s trying to say: “See, reader, I’m nothing like him [The Feminist]; see what a self-aware feminist I am, how capable I am of cataloging the hypocrisies of male feminist praxis.”
The question of who gets to write about what has long been a controversial one in the publishing world. Tulathimutte, a straight forty-something Asian man, writes from the perspective of both a woman and a gay man in this collection. While telling writers to stick to their own experiences and identities is reductive, works like this illustrate that the line between imagination and appropriation — between representation and misrepresentation — is precariously thin.
Rejection is a fact of life, but it’s also inordinately common in the publishing industry. Tulathimutte noted on a podcast that he has received around 400 rejections since the start of his writing career. Although he was able to sell “Rejection” alongside his debut novel, most writers have significantly less luck and success. As a young writer, I find this fact both comforting and unsettling. Rejection is an inevitable process in creative professions, and yet persistence alone is not enough to successfully publish in a fiercely competitive industry where new talents, market demands and reader appetites are constantly changing.
In some alternative universe, we all make decisions that are just as ill-fated as some of the characters in this book. What I took away from this, besides that Tulathimutte has a talent for repping the chronically online, is that we should all tread lightly around the psychological fixations of rejection — the artificial narratives we build around our perceived failures, and our projections onto other people. Because, in the end, who hasn’t faced rejection?
Corina PO ’28 lives between Southern California and South Korea. She prefers paperback over hardcover books.
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