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Why High-Achieving Women Pretend Their Lives Are a Mess
The insidious popularity of ‘Liz Lemoning’
Twitter virality is the cultural diagnostic tool of our time, the DSM for our internet-broken brains. Which is why it’s not surprising that a recent Tweet about Liz Lemon, the quirky heroine of the 2010s series 30 Rock (played by the series showrunner, Tina Fey) struck a nerve:
Jason Sim’s tweet went as viral as it did because he named something we all recognize: One doesn’t need to be a 30 Rock fan to know exactly the type he’s talking about.
Before Liz Lemoning was a meme, Fey’s character showed the world an entirely new kind of rom-com protagonist: the Hot Mess. She was a striver in the workplace, but she also binged on baked goods and watched Real Housewives. She was a singleton on the dating market who was also a raging prude. She was consistently the smartest person in the room. She also sometimes wore plastic Duane Reade shopping bags as underwear.
“From the beginning Liz Lemon was pathetic,” Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New Yorker in…
