If you want to read about regular people, about real life, about struggle and hardship, about poverty and difficulty, you have to read fictionalized accounts in non-fiction books like Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment or Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland. The books sell copies and movie rights. They even win Oscars. So why can’t anybody write a novel about the infinitely interesting people who appear in these books? Why are novels filled with mental masturbation of spoiled rich people? Even in the ghost sex novel I read the other day, the 22-year-old main character is living off an inheritance. An inheritance! Have you ever met any people who don’t have to work because they have an inheritance? Me neither.

Where is a novel about a 22-year-old who works at a grocery store and goes to a laundromat? He’s a million times more interesting than some bored rich fuck with an inheritance. Where is a novel about a 26-year-old with six kids by two different fathers? She appears in MacGillis’s book about Amazon. Screw Amazon! This is a life worth immortalizing in a novel.

I subscribe to several lists of fresh releases of fiction. It’s between spoiled rich people and World War I with scary regularity. Where are the writers who can write about anything else? In the non-fiction section, apparently.