Your favorite documenter of American suburban despair says a lot about you. John Cheever, the famously alcoholic master short story writer, was tortured by his inability to reconcile his sexuality with his WASP background. Richard Yates, who wrote Revolutionary Road, speaks to people that have dropped their personal dreams for what they see as the American ideal. Virginia Woolf, though her novels aren’t exactly suburban, also deals with how men and women deal with the brutal mundanity of everyday life. Sylvia Plath did the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.
A new entrant could be Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator and showrunner of BoJack Horseman. Bob-Waksberg tweeted a poem to Marge Simpson a month ago. And we missed it, but it’s been resurfacing on social media, so here it is.
There’s a quiet beauty there. Now we have to go read “The Swimmer” and weep.