Introduction

The Rumpus Book Club Pick, May 2022
Most Anticipated Books of 2022, The Rumpus
16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You’ll Love, BuzzFeed

“[C]omic but still tender…. I Only Cry with Emoticons masterfully captures both the anxiety and hope of our modern lives.”—BuzzFeed

“What I love about Zalkow’s fiction is how he zips so many of our contemporary anxieties into smart prose…. I Only Cry With Emoticons is tender, searing, and consistently relatable. Zalkow takes the fragmentation of modern life—like our constantly beeping phones, our up-next streams, the very nature of the always-on internet—and transforms this digital garbage into a story that takes hold of the heart.”—Wendy Fox, Bomb Magazine

Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the bathroom writing a novel about his dead grandfather and wonders why his boss wants to fire him. He tells his almost ex-wife about a blind date and wonders why she slams the door in his face. He aches with worry for his seven-year-old son, who seems happier living with his mom and her new man.

When the blind date becomes a complicated relationship, and Saul’s blunders at work threaten the survival of the company, Saul has to wake up and confront his fears.

I Only Cry with Emoticons is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnected—even when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicate—and an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline.

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Excerpt

Chapter One: HelloWorld.java

My boss tells me it’s embarrassing that I’ve been here for six years and I’m still at Goldfish status. Ever since we installed the gamification plug-in, he knows exactly how many Likes I’ve gotten from coworkers, exactly how many Comments I’ve made, exactly how many Best Answers and Virtual Pints of Beer I’ve received, exactly how many Blog Posts I’ve posted. He even knows how many animated cat GIFs I’ve giffed, which is zero. We get points assigned to these various activities and are assigned a status level based on our points. I’m a Goldfish even though some six-monthers have already leveled up to Penguin. My boss is a Blue Whale. People think Blue Whale is the highest level, but there’s an even higher level that no one has ever achieved.

He tells me this morning that I need to @ mention more people in my Posts. The Chief Technical Officer needs to know what I’m up to. Especially after the layoffs last year. And I can’t overlook the Algorithm group. They were the ones who wrote the algorithm for the Trending Topics plug-in in the first place. People need more visibility into what I’m doing.

But what I’m doing a lot of the time is hiding in the bathroom and writing stories about my dead grandfather and failing to @ mention the people I especially don’t want to @ mention because I’m all @ mentioned out.

Look. CollaborationHub is not a bad place to work. They’re good people. The online collaboration software they make is a good product. They give my family—or at least me and my boy—good health insurance. And they actually Help People Collaborate Effectively in This Modern World™. It’s really true that they Take Collaboration to the Next Level™.

But I don’t happen to like collaborating in this modern world. I don’t like this level or the next one. I also don’t think I know how to get a proper job any longer. I’ve coded my way out of employability. I’m no longer a catch for an employer, if I ever was one.

When I get back to my desk, I see that I have some private CollabHub messages waiting for me at my laptop. They’re from Anne, my coworker who has dedicated too many office hours trying to save my floundering life. She says she’d be happy to set up a personal profile for me either on OkCupid or just on our internal dating group. At CollaborationHub, we use our own software to collaborate with each other, and we have over four thousand social groups, which is pretty impressive (and pretty horrifying) for a company of 321 employees.

Anne sits at the desk next to me. She looks so focused at her two 25” monitors, like she is doing nothing but serious work. There’s a small desert rose cactus between us, sitting on her desk, that she overwaters. She claims it has a beautiful flower, but I’ve never seen one.

We’ve moved beyond cubicles around here. Cubicles are so twenty years ago. Even half-height walls are old school. Here we just have these big ugly slabs of pressed wood pushed up against each other—making little islands of desks, about four together at a time. Anne is on my desert island.

I lean over and talk to Anne old school—with my actual mouth. Just what I need, I say to her. To date an effective collaborator at the next level.

She whispers to me over the cactus, I can @ mention you in the Singles group or the Just For Fun group or the Divorce? group. She has these cute chunky cheeks with dimples but also long gray strands in her black hair, and it’s impossible to gauge her age, except that she somehow captures the best of both worlds, old and young. Whereas I’m the worst of age forty-five: too old to have fun, too young for wisdom.

I remind Anne, again, that I’m not officially divorced.

She says she’s even willing to @ mention me in the SSFW (“Semi-Safe For Work”) Kinky group. And Pet Lovers. And Lonely Guys.

I hate pets, I tell her.

She gets up and walks right next to me. I can smell her perfume. Some kind of flower that my wife—and probably my son—could identify instantly.

Saul, it’s been two years since she left you. Divorced or not, y’all are done for. Anne’s Southern accent comes out when she’s frustrated with me. It’s comforting, her accent. Even though I know it came along with some his- tory of abuse. And collard greens.

I also grew up in the South. But living in the suburbs of Atlanta with Jewish parents threw off the accent.

Anne makes it seem like two years is a long time. But it doesn’t feel so long to me. Some days I still unthinkingly drive home to what is now my ex’s house.

I’m trying to finish my novel, I tell her.

She takes a deep breath and then sighs.

I love my friend. She never lies to me. When she’s exasperated, she exasperates.

Anne thinks I’m wasting my time with my book. She likes to remind me that I’ve been working on the stupid book longer than my boy has been alive. I regret confessing that detail to her. My debut novel was published to a lukewarm audience ten years ago, and the audience is not even lukecold at this point.

This book is toxic to you, she says. I see it on your face.

I take a selfie with my iPhone and look at it. And delete it before it syncs with the cloud. She’s right.

I need to finish it before my father dies, I say. He’s the only one still alive. I need to finish telling our story.

So whose story is it exactly?

I don’t watch regular TV, if such a thing still exists. I particularly don’t watch courtroom dramas. But I understand enough about entrapment to know what she is doing.

I fall for it anyway.

It’s my grandfather’s story. But also my dad’s story. But maybe also my story. I tell her all this even though she knows all this. I know she is about to point out that since it is my story, I can tell it anytime. There’s no ticking clock even if my dad is eighty-eight years old and going blind and deaf.

I mean, she says, did the Klan even try to destroy your grandfather’s store?

Anne looks at me like she won the game.

My friend takes things too literally. She doesn’t understand that fiction is more true than what really happened. In the novel, my Polish, Jewish grandparents open up a dry goods store in 1938 in a place called Stella, Georgia. In real life, it happened in 1931 in Waynesboro, Georgia. In real life, a drunk man stumbles into the store and warns my grandfather about the Klan and then vomits on the floor, and that’s that. In the novel, this man is in the Klan. And he nearly destroys my family.

It’s a brilliant book. It’s a disaster.

What about your boy?

He’s not in the book, I say.

But he’s already seven years old.

You’re a hell of a counter, I tell her. I’ll @ mention you in the Math Is 4 Fun group.

Go take him somewhere fun. Get to the beach before the summer is over. Take the attention you give to the book and give it to your son. Worry about the book when your son is off to college or culinary school or the Marines or Mexico. Let the book go. Imagine what you could do if you let that turd go.

It hurts when she calls it a turd. A burden, yes. A thing that is killing me, yes. Something that destroyed my marriage and has stunted my growth emotionally, maybe. But a turd! That’s going too far. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. What is Saul's main issue at the start of the book? Is there a difference between what Saul thinks his problems are and what the reader thinks Saul's problems are?
2. Why do you think Saul doesn't reference his son and ex-wife by name during most of the book?
3. Who were Saul's mentors and what did they teach him?
4. What role do digital devices and digital communication play in this story?
5. Did Saul change by the end of the book? If so, how did he change?

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