Female Loneliness Epidemic by Danielle Chelosky (2025, Far West Press)

He Said I Was Beautiful And I Said I Didn't Care

Reviewer’s note: I listened to Oneohtrix Point Never whilst reading this book, which turned out to be an excellent happy accident of a soundtrack.

If you know who Danielle Chelosky is, then you probably already have an opinion of her, and her writing.

That’s great, and I’m really happy for you. This review, however, is my opinion, and as I am me, it’s the most important opinion in the universe. Crazy how that works.

Female Loneliness Epidemic is a small collection of autofiction short stories, small in length and in form. Its 4×7-inch size gives it the feel of a chapbook, while its brilliant pink cover makes it the cutest book I own.

DC’s prose and timing are nothing short of a marvel. She moves effortlessly from poetic descriptions of the sea, of which she is curiously enamoured, to hilarious anecdotes about her calamitous nature, and then, on a dime, to shocking, Houellebecqian violence.

Quite how she achieves this so well in such short stories, I am still trying to understand. In just a couple of pages, you can feel the full spectrum of human emotion, it’s remarkable.

The humour here is wonderful. DC is evidently something of a daydreamer, and her elaborate fantasies, about speeding lorries and controlling things with her mind, had me laughing out loud. So did her dry, nasty-girl moments. At one point, after a break-up, a man tells her she’s beautiful, and she replies that she doesn’t care.

The book is full of moments of micro-brilliance like this. The timing and pacing of the stories are pitch-perfect, it’s almost as if DC catches herself in real time whenever she indulges in too much beautiful prose about the sea or sky, immediately following it with a line about vomiting or something else grotesque to drag you back to exactly where she wants you to be.

There’s an invisible disdain for the reader, a bad attitude behind the words. You should feel lucky to be reading them, and not expect to get what you want from them.

The book also lives up to its title, and the feeling of loneliness and disconnection from humanity is ever-present. Groups of girls are also viewed with disdain, giving us a portrait of a woman who chooses loneliness as a companion to her daydreams.

Reading this for the first time made me feel the same way I did when I first read Chris Kraus or Kathy Acker. DC’s attitude and style place her firmly in the pantheon of the best female autofiction writers, where she absolutely deserves to be.

I’ve long desired a new lead “bad girl” in my life, a new Carrie Bradshaw, a new Hannah Horvath. Reading Kraus and Acker, and watching Sex & the City and Girls, taught me more about women than I could ever have learned on my own.

All of that literature and media was a secret window, laying bare the lives, loves, and misfortunes of modern femininity.

After reading the story “Broken,” I cried and then stared out of my window. I thought about all the girls who had loved me when I was the singer in a band, and how many I had hurt by constantly cheating on them.

I thought about how no one had taught me how to treat women when I was a teenager, and how I only learned for myself as an adult, long after I had stopped dating, when it hardly even mattered.

Women like DC bridge the gap between the sexes, removing gender from its locked room by exposing their souls and their innermost secrets, and laying them bare for the world to see.

This is autofiction at its bravest, funniest, and most moving, and my favourite indie-lit release this year. Highly recommended.

You can buy Female Loneliness Epidemic, from Far West Press, here.