Super Sad True Love Story

Eunice and Grillbitch’s earliest conversations overflow with descriptions, often extreme, of sexual behavior. Even Lenny’s diary entries are graphic, desperate, and consumed with lust. The thirst for sex penetrates the society of FACing and ranking based on Attractiveness, Fuckability, Personality, and other features. Shteyngart imagines a society in which “pop-off sheer panties” and see-through jeans by companies named “TotalSurrender” are sold on websites called “AssLuxury” (44). Intense language often accompanies the sexuality that individuals seek.

Obsession with youth makes youthful appearance and attachment desirable. One major clothing website is called TeenyBoppers. Lenny is attracted to how extremely young Eunice looks, and that attraction becomes an obsession for Joshie, who encourages her to find a partner who matches her youth. Although young people seem promiscuous, they joke about virginity. Grillbitch jokes with Eunice, one day, after descriptions of her boyfriend’s penis: “See what a virgin I am? Ha ha” (43).

Graphic, even violent, sex is the norm. When Lenny first learns about FACing, one of the young women he is most attracted to has a “Child Abuse Multimedia” (89) piece that combines screaming with her naked body. A Media influencer publicly shares pornographic videos of his repeated, aggressive sexual encounters. Sex is an outward fact of life in this society, and Lenny’s gentle willingness to perform oral sex on Eunice repeatedly stands out as odd and countercultural by comparison.

Super Sad True Love Story begins with Lenny Abramov’s claim that he is “never going to die” (1). It ends with Lenny’s admission that he is “going to die” (302). While he experiences America destructed “so suddenly, spectacularly, irreversibly” (328), Lenny must constantly face the idea of mortality that those around him work passionately to escape. Submitting to death, at the end of the text, is his most countercultural act.

Lenny lives surrounded by people who are constantly dying. Although Lenny displays a bias against death from the outset, judging the “stench of death” (19) on the old sculptor who hits on Eunice in the first chapter, he also surrounds himself with it. His books also bear an antiquated smell, one that betrays him as part of a world already gone by. Although he halfheartedly plans to begin dechronification processes at Post-Human Services, he feels unsettled by Joshie once Joshie actually undergoes those procedures.

To Lenny, Eunice represents unending youth. For her part, Eunice does not actively fear death; instead, she often avoids it. Traveling to Tompkins Park awakens in Eunice an awareness of others’ lives and their fragility. Both Lenny and Eunice, in their ultimate connections to their families, envision life as beyond just their own mortality. As Grace seems to realize, and as Nettie Fine teaches Lenny, life is not only a cycle of “birth and death” but a cycle of history that connects families beyond the span of an individual life.