As a critic, Lauren Oyler has spent a lot of time writing essays that attempt to convince an audience to pay attention to something that could easily be called irrelevant: usually a book.
But how do we decide what does matter? If not caring about anything pegs you as a retrograde nihilist, caring too much, about the wrong things, is, at best, embarrassing and uncool; at worst, it may be immoral. What obsesses us is "real" and significant, but the contours of that significance are often blurry; it is easy to confuse care with importance, importance with obligation, particularly when there are apparently rewards for doing so.
In this collection of interlinked essays, Oyler explores various modern phenomena - from online arguments, the popularity of #MeToo, autofiction, reality TV, fake news and conspiracy theories - to show how ideas about what is and is not important have shaped culture, how irrelevance can provide freedom as well as madness, and how caring or not caring is rarely a straightforward enterprise.
