Female Loneliness Epidemic

by Danielle Chelosky

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

90 pages, Paperback

Published October 21, 2025

About the author

Danielle Chelosky is a writer and journalist from New York. She works at Stereogum and has bylines in NPR, The Fader, and Billboard. She is an editor at Hobart and an editorial assistant at Amphetamine Sulphate. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2022 and was awarded the Lori Hertzberg Prize for Creativity. She is the author of PREGAMING GRIEF and BABY BRUISE.

Reviews

[Colette Bernheim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danielle Chelosky is THE voice of a generation.

[Jack Skelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Speaking of Chris Kraus, Danielle Chelosky entered my world with a request to forward her early chapbook to Kraus… who enjoyed it. Me too. Since then, Chelosky’s books have buffed-up into (Mary) Gaitskillian or (Lynn) Tillmanian tales of wayward fucking/romance. She even titled her recent series of NYC readings Weird Fucks, after Tillman’s early collection (which I devoured at the time I was writing Fear of Kathy Acker). The charm of Female Loneliness Epidemic is not in the stories per se, but the details and tone of angsty pleasure and compulsion. One line I circled: “He thought it was silly I liked to keep my underwear on during sex, pushed to the side. I didn’t want him to think it was silly. I wanted it to be sexy.” This tracks with a bolded, pleasure-dom line that climaxes the first paragraph of Fear of Kathy Acker: “Just leave your underwear on!” While Chelosky hits rich veins, she cultivates a personal iconography of White Claws, schoolgirl skirts and fishnets. (From my review in XRAY Lit Mag: https://xraylitmag.com/word-horny-jac...

[crowjonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fresh-feeling, propulsive collection. Somehow not just iterations on a theme, though there certainly are themes. These feel slightly less harried, a little bit more under control. The writing is careful. Not so different than previous works, still shimmering with artistic intuition. You can’t deny that Danielle has “the eye.”

[Sloddervos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Piepklein kort boekje, zoals de naam doet vermoeden enorm van de tijd. De meeste verhalen zijn goed, sommige zijn erg goed, sommige zijn prima. Af en toe voelt het wel een beetje als herhaling, het fucked up twintiger vrouw syndroom kan af en toe vervelen in de veelheid ervan. Wijst we een priemende vinger naar de auteur zelf en elke fucked up twintiger vrouw (geen van je smaken en ideeën en interesses en de dingen die jouw als persoon vromen zijn origineel) maar dat is welkom.

Ben benieuwd of ze ook lange vorm heeft geschreven!

[Nanci · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a bad girl. Thank you thank you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.

Loved these stories — the cultural references, the messiness, the familiarity of those things... My favorite aspect, maybe, is the way reflections and observations appear. They feel like being pinched, or sticking your face in the freezer. Something like this.

[Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had me reminiscing about the Vic smoking area

[Ella · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tried and failed to like this. Subject matter just isn’t my vibe I don’t like reading about a penis

[Codycvlp · Rating 5 out of 5]

every single story I could see in my head, cloud was my favorite, Danielle Chelosky has been my favorite writer this year.

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I turned 42 a couple weeks ago (and Spotify Wrapped thinks I'm 67). I have had exactly one romantic relationship with a person I met on a dating app (OK Cupid, for about 3 months, some 13 years ago). I don't game (or use game as a verb). I hate almost everything that's happened to hip-hop post-Migos. I own my home. My knees hurt. I'm tired. All of which is to say that, while I still often feel like a young(ish) person out in the world, I'm not so delusional that I can't accept and admit I no longer understand what it's like to be one. Not really. Not under these brainrotting conditions. Not in these doomscrolling times.

Danielle Chelosky however, more than any other artist I know, is doing the maryjanes-on-the-ground work of capturing that feeling for all of us. This is not a writer interested in further handwringing over, say, the patriarchal pervasion of internet porn and its influence on modern sexual proclivities, or who sees the climate crisis and late-stage capitalism as still-escapable threats to be heroically combatted and solved. This is a writer to whom these things are already happening; for whom they are settled reality and pretty much always have been; things simply to be navigated and experienced; observed and reported. 

Yet conversely, in eschewing the ADHD poetics and evaporative slang of her online in extremis peers, Chelosky's compact, nut-punch sentences also transcend our (increasingly, weirdly) tribalist generational divides, and notch the brain like stick-and-poke tattoos. Her nervy, anti-filtered dispatches from the blackout drunk heart of her reckless youth find literary ballast in the vaguely hopeful nihilism of everyone from Sylvia Plath to Charles Bukowski; Erica Jong to Mary Gaitskill to Michel Houellebecq. She's the voice of a generation that fully understands there's no such thing.

If Pregaming Grief was about Chelosky figuring out what she wanted, Female Loneliness Epidemic is about what it means to go out and get it. These stories are by turns funny and harrowing, sexy and grim. Sometimes the scariest thing a woman can be is honest. About her desires; about her disgust; about all the things she, and centuries of women before her, demurely chose not to say. Chelosky possesses a unique gift for this kind of radical honesty - for writing about being young and lost and fervent and free in ways that help us fusty 42-cum-67-year-olds better remember what it was like back then, and better understand what it's like now. I'm grateful for her candor. It's our fucked up world after all. She's just out here living in it.

[Bríghde · Rating 2 out of 5]

i was let down, story after story — i don’t really know what i expected, probably just more substance & a bit more insight, or self-loathing, or grit, or anything to really give it personality. i hated every story until Bad Behaviour, where it picked up for me, & even then, i truly, truly think Chelosky can do better than:
“The water was as clear as a translucent coat of nail polish … The water’s glimmering ripples resembled veins if veins lit up like glow sticks.”
come on!!
it wasn’t all bad, each story fit the next. it felt nostalgic & voyeuristic & ambivalent, not really caring about the reader, which i do sort of like. like picking at a scab on your partner’s back while he fucks you — absentminded.

i thought — this is great substack & magazine article material. maybe i just fundamentally can’t relate to a new york literary it girl? it’s too far away from me, & being a writer & self-loathing girl myself maybe i’m just jealous of this accessibility conventionally attractive people born, or just living, in America seem to have, & all she wrote about for the first half of her book was getting choked during sex by boring, detestable men that she equally taunted & fawned over. a knee-jerk reaction of someone who desperately wanted to like this book because i like Chelosky’s short-form writing & follow her instagram. because i see myself in her taunting & fawning. but i felt almost sad reading it, like she missed an opportunity. i wanted to be her friend & tell her “babe this one needs to cook more” (in this fantasy i’m also a new york it girl with a literary career whose opinion holds fashionable weight, & not an unemployed late-20s girl from small-city australia who won’t give up the word “girl” for “woman” — i think you can do that in new york without shame though)

but i think it’s much more simple than all that: i didn’t like the writing style & i gained nothing from reading it, however alike or dissimilar i am to her nameless narrators, there was nothing here for me — & that’s fine!

[CORSAK fan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danielle has really shown her gift for creating totally immersive writing here. It felt like I was watching each story play out. I looked up and forgot I was in a dorm room for a moment.

Human skin has undertones of color, and Danielle's writing has undertones of compulsive and reckless behavior. Like an eruption will happen at any second but you don't know when, like for some volcanoes. This is what truly sets the collection apart and makes it lovable. Individually, the stories themselves have merit, yes. But they're all tied together by bad decision after bad decision.

The stretch of stories that starts with Broken and concludes with Cloud is my favorite. Broken and Cloud are my two personal favorites, but others are noteworthy, too. I thought it was a sweet touch to dedicate some of the stories to people, on a small note.

"He showed me love through silence, and silence could either be peaceful or oppressive. It was up to me to choose." [Broken]

"I look up and see a little girl with pink ribbons in her hair biking in the middle of the street. Her dad runs over and gets her and mouths I'M SORRY at us even though he can't see us behind the tinted windshield. He pushes the bike with training wheels onto the sidewalk and picks the girl up into his arms and raises her toward the sky like a trophy. Sirens ring in the distance, or maybe that's just one of my boy's songs playing in my head." [Cloud]

[Francisco Manuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Danielle Chelosky’s Female Loneliness Epidemic is a small book with a sharp pulse. Written in tight bursts that read less like traditional short stories than charged monologues, the collection delivers quick hits of vice, sex, fantasy, and attitude. It is compulsively shareable: each piece feels like a drug. The stories are brief, potent, and slightly destabilizing.

Told from the perspective of a young woman moving through New York, Chelosky’s fiction captures the peculiar isolation of modern intimacy. The encounters themselves are almost beside the point; what lingers is the loneliness that follows, the gap between fantasy and lived experience. Her narrators drink, drift, daydream, and place themselves in precarious situations with a kind of careless lucidity. There is no plea for sympathy and no hunger for shock value. The bruises are visible, but worn without sentimentality.

Female Loneliness Epidemic lives up to its title: loneliness permeates every page. It’s a tiny book that trusts the reader to read between the lines, and rewards those who do.

[Trey Breen · Rating 4 out of 5]

despite having already read two works by the author, this admittingly took me a second to get on the same wavelength, but once I did I was engrossed. it is a pretty short collection of stories, but I read roughly 60% today in two sittings. lots of lingering details floating around the characters, but the stretch from Broken to Cloud (dedicated lovingly to 2hollis) was particularly filled to the brim with so much great character work.

[Sagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are certain texts that fall into the great tradition of girlhood narrative. I don’t mean coming of age novels or great feminist essays, I mean texts that speak to universal feelings that women have, even through completely dissimilar experiences. I related and I was relieved to no longer be in my 20s.

[Hailey Skinner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up because 1) the cover 2) someone referred to Chelosky as the voice of a generation 3) December is almost up and I needed a short book to stay on track for my reading goal.

These had some funny one liners, but almost all of them were centered on men, alcohol, or romanticized injuries, lol. Sardonic or not, I'd think our generation would have a little bit more to say.

[reading serval · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED this! It's like literary sex and the city told through the lens of aging coquette influencers and their ilk. I found this collection deceptively insightful; it started off seeming kind of cliche but as I kept feeling compelled to turn the pages I found so much to sift through and think about. Honestly such a solid critique of the black holes that are misogyny and capitalism.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories reads like a sub 20 minute punk album. The stories pack a punch in a succinct amount of words that keep you enticed from start to finish. Underneath all the sex and alcohol is a relatable thread of loneliness and despair. My favorite stories were Scum, Dickbook, Broken, Idiot, Cloud, Doe Dislocated, and Baby.

[blush]

very funny, heartbreaking, and relatable. got this from a good friend julie and at first i was sort of offended that she saw a book w this name and thought of me, but i am glad she did lol

hopefully i wont have to relate to getting a partiful invite to a funeral

[sienna]

my boy and i fuck a lot but i know how boys are. boys get bored by girlfriends. they want bitches and sluts. that’s what he says in his songs. when i ask him about it he says baby those are just bars.

[Jasmyn Buduan · Rating 5 out of 5]

exquisite

[Elizabeth]

my friend danielle wrote this : )

[Molly Wagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

a book about the eternal cosmic woman

[Mike Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

sad. horny. intimate. I very much enjoyed this collection of moments in the lives of the characters within these pages. looking forward to reading more from danielle chelosky.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luminary.

[Gin]

Raw and honest

[Jorge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es buena la tía.

[Lily Platt · Rating 5 out of 5]

what i've been looking for from my nyc girl writers

[Arcadia · Rating 3 out of 5]

very cohesive world. commitment to the bit. artifice? of course, but when is the bit transparent in its bit-ness (not sturdy enough to go beyond the act of performance). great title.

[Rain · Rating 1 out of 5]

The twitter feed of an edgy woman in her mid 20s to early 30s in the shape of a book.

I’m not the target audience for this book. I did not care for the subject matter that much; actually I found it a bit exhausting.

I did like the writing towards the end of the book.

1.75