Melissa Broder describes her third novel, Death Valley, as “a send-up of autofiction”. Its opening section sticks loosely to Broder’s life: an unnamed LA-based novelist drives out into the desert on a research trip for her new book. Her father is in an intensive care unit, just as Broder’s was while she was writing Death Valley. Her husband has a mysterious chronic illness, just as Broder’s does. But about 40 pages in, things take a turn for the surreal. While on a hike, the protagonist encounters a giant cactus. And inside the cactus she meets her father in child form.
So begins a witty, psychedelic exploration of grief – the wackiest book yet in an oeuvre that includes 2018’s cult favourite The Pisces, about a woman falling in love with a merman. For Broder, the harsh Californian desert provided the perfect backdrop for a story about a woman navigating complex feelings of, as she puts it, “anticipatory grief”. As she says: “We are powerless over our emotions. We are powerless over how long grief is going to last. And we are powerless over nature. But although the desert can appear desolate, it is actually teeming with life – you have to learn how to navigate that terrain.”
The idea for this story of grief and desert survival came to Broder during the pandemic. Her father had been in an accident and was in an ICU on the east coast. Due to Covid, the family weren’t allowed to visit. Driving through the desert to her sister’s house in Las Vegas – “trying to escape a feeling, like my narrator” – provided the spark for her not-so-auto autofiction. Working on the book gave Broder what Covid had denied: “It made me feel really connected to my dad.”
She wrote it as a homage. And unlike The Pisces and 2020’s Milk Fed, which were written through dictation, she “wanted it to be like poetry all along – I just wanted that level of refinement.” After writing each chapter, she would edit it hard, sentence by sentence, in the hope that each section “would be a diamond”.
Her father died in May 2021 and Broder continued working on Death Valley for another year. “The whole time I felt like, not that it was going to bring him back, but that we still had this forward propulsion together. And then when I finished the book and sent it to my agent, I was like, ‘Oh. He’s really not coming back.’”
Despite all this, Death Valley is often riotously funny. While the protagonist meets few other people in the desert, her internal monologue is accented by a motley chorus of Reddit commenters, woo-woo audiobook hosts and anthropomorphic rocks. Broder rose to prominence as the anonymous author of an account on X (formerly Twitter) called So Sad Today, which chronicled the abject loneliness of modern life through a wry, pithy lens.
While Death Valley isn’t necessarily about the internet in the way that other recent millennial novels have been, it’s still sharply attuned to the way social media can be a potent source of stress, solace and absurdity, often at the same time. “Most of us are completely in a relationship with the internet,” says Broder, “but I also find Reddit so hilarious – the language of it is very funny. People aren’t just posting when they’re having a great day, right? It’s more like when they’re in hell and seeking an answer. I like to have a good time when I’m writing – and I knew I would have fun writing about Reddit.”
Broder’s relationship to X is more complex. She says the site “lost its lustre about five years ago, long before ‘the musking’” – meaning its purchase by Elon Musk. “What I loved about Twitter was that it was a weird place where you could become friends with, like, this bat avatar, or a moose on rollerskates. And you’d have no idea who this person is, but every day you’d look forward to their weird tweets. Over the past five years there have been more points to prove, less experimentation and more certitude. My feed doesn’t feel any more like this weird little village of poetics and humour. It’s now a less explicitly experimental, more decisive mishmash of hell.”
Even so, Twitter (spoiler alert) provides one of Death Valley’s best gags, as the narrator opens the app to see that a rival author has announced a book about a woman whose father is reincarnated as a Montezuma cypress tree. The scene was inspired by Broder’s discovery that Sheila Heti had written a novel – Pure Colour – about a woman whose father is reincarnated as a leaf.
“I love Sheila Heti,” says Broder. “She and Ottessa Moshfegh are probably the two contemporary writers I’m most envious of, because of their talent and their not-online-ness. When I saw that announcement, I was like, ‘I’m fucked. It’s all over for me. It’s all over for the book.’ I called my best friend and she was like, ‘Dude, just put it in the novel.’”
The nature of Death Valley’s conception has given Broder mixed feelings about its release. “Since I sold the book, I’ve been like, ‘Why am I not as glowingly happy about it as I was about Milk Fed and The Pisces?’ I published a book – that’s what every author wants. But I don’t have that celebratory feeling.” And yet, she adds: “It might be my favourite. I’m so proud of it, so glad it’s in the world.”
• Death Valley is published by Bloomsbury (£13.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
