alexis's Reviews> Manic Pixie Egirl

** spoiler alert ** [10/17/23 edit: the author is clearly trying to rebrand this book in a new attempt to viral market it to 4chan instead of tiktok, crossposting screenshots of his own greentext posts on reddit to drum up interest, so I’m going to include the original book synopsis here. See if you can spot the difference:

“Manic Pixie Egirl is a deep dive into the damaging world of hypersexualized online environments. With honesty, wit, and compassion, Lemcke explores the crippling effects of growing up with unrestricted internet access.

Much like the iconic manic pixie dream girl trope itself, this narrative unveils a disconcerting truth: countless men raised on the internet find themselves trapped in a paradigm where they perceive women as nothing more than idealized objects of desire, tragically overlooking their fundamental humanity.

The story centers around the troubled and perverse mind of Aldon Goodnight, an internet-addicted loner, as he struggles to overcome the symptoms of a debilitating mental illness. With the help of a well-intentioned, if slightly misguided therapist, he embarks on a chaotic and ultimately transformative journey to fully embrace all of his addictions in an effort to rid himself of them forever.

Prescient, timely, and utterly captivating, Manic Pixie Egirl is a literary tour de force that explores trauma, addiction, and the yearning for intimacy in the digital age.” ]




This story is told across three alternating narratives - an allegorical fantasy tale about a man named Anon who has to rescue the missing “”” free-spirited””” princess of a magical kingdom, excerpts from a gritty dystopian tell-all “Confessions of a Government Manifestor”, and finally a poor attempt at semi-autobiographical Charles Bukowski, following a 33yo Redditor who makes occasional half-hearted internet references but is mostly trying to have sex with his tiktok camgirl neighbor, who is the egirl guru of a cult of dumb bimbos.

The totally mysterious awesome literary significance of these three tooootally unique and intriguing storylines is that around halfway through, Confessions of a Government Manifestor reveals that 9/11 was an inside job (to defeat communism in the year of our lord 2001) that resulted in a split timeline, and the fantasy world narrative is the Original Good Ending Timeline where Americans discovered the 9/11 plot, and as a result society devolved into a magic feudal monarchy city state. The 22-year-old camgirl was conceived on 9/11, and was basically a byproduct of the negative energy of the 33yo redditor’s parents’ divorce, so in order to fix the timeline they must basically have sex. The book ends as they’re orgasming.

If that doesn’t already sound annoying to you, remember that a real life 33-year-old Redditor who has opinions on crypto and Harambe the gorilla is writing this book. The narrator spends the majority of one chapter describing, in detail, the gonewild subreddit and how Reddit karma works. He talks about ahegao faces and “uwu” expressions. Characters argue about Berenstein vs. Berenstain bears. The camgirl posits that maybe Mother Nature is a kinky slut who loves being abused so maybe it’s anti-feminist if we DON’T litter, and the 33yo Redditor thinks about how special and Not Like Other Girls she is.

This book is annoying. It’s trying to be onlyfans Fight Club, written by a guy who clearly LOVES Chuck Palahniuk but doesn’t even have the guts to commit to the gross-out elements that made his writing so memorable to teenagers. Scenes might as well end with “and then he fucked her with a carrot (horny smiling devil emoji) >:)”. It’s Scott Pilgrim written by a dude who wants to have sex with Belle Delphine, Lana Del Rey, the Red Scare podcast chicks (I’m assuming), and definitely 100% envies Grimes and Elon Musk’s relationship.

It’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation by someone who is trying really, reeeeeally hard to half-ass some #Deep emotions regarding 9/11 by comparing his two parents getting a divorce to the twin towers crashing (he has a poem on the same topic in one of his instagram story collections), and who has also clearly never read a book written by a female author before last year aside from Harry Potter, and maaaaybe Flannery O’Connor if he saw her as the one obligatory addition in a playboy “100 books every man HAS to read before he dies” list. There’s attempts at tarot and numerology and zodiac signs to appeal to the tiktok girlies, but all of it falls so laughably flat that it gives me second hand embarrassment.

I could go on and on about how vapid, unoriginal, and poorly-written I found this book. I don’t think you should spend $3 on it, or spend three hours reading it.

Disclaimer: this book IS self-published, so it was possibly a TINY bit unfair for me to hold it to the artistic standards of a traditionally-published novel, and I only paid $2.99 for the ebook out of morbid curiosity after hearing secondhand about the author’s failed corny tiktok self-promotion campaign, in which he vowed to read a different book written by a woman every day until his book got on the NYT bestsellers’ list. I don’t use tiktok, but this seems like such a hilariously misguided and obviously cynical attempt to profit off of booktok that I am mostly, again, just embarrassed for the author. It’s also actually REALLY funny how many of the five star goodreads reviews for this book are transparently sock puppet accounts with literally ONLY this book on their page.