It’s strange to think that not too long ago Melissa Broder was mostly unknown beyond New York City’s poetry community.

Then in 2012 she began doing something that would eventually lead to the national profile and universe of fans she has today. She created the Twitter alias @sosadtoday and began barfing out dispatches from her anxious brain. The account quickly took off, and soon even celebrities like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus were retweeting @sosadtoday. The writer struggled with anxiety and depression, it was clear, but she used dark, brilliant, self-deprecating humor to deal.

Fans couldn’t put a name to the tweeter until May 2015, when Broder unmasked in a Rolling Stone interview. A book deal soon followed, and in 2016 Grand Central Publishing released the essay collection So Sad Today. Vanity Fair called Broder’s book “a triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose,” while GQ named her “the internet’s most powerful merchant of feelings.” The suburban Philadelphia native blew up like confetti.

After a bazillion more neurotic, hilarious tweets and popular columns in Elle and VICE, Broder is back in the spotlight with her debut novel The Pisces, a strange, sexy, and addictive story about a disastrous woman who falls in love with a Venice Beach merman.

“Falling in love with a merman is not for everybody,” Broder tells Penthouse. “But if you’re the type of person who craves the intoxicating potentiality of the first weeks of an affair, who wishes that an erotic moment could sustain itself infinitely, and who doesn’t understand why fantasy can’t just be reality, then you are merman bait. I am that person.”

Broder writes fearlessly, with humor and depth, examining the maniac highs and lows of fucking and falling in love. “If I’m not turning myself on when I write erotica, I’m doing something wrong,” Broder says. “The writer should be wet.”

Elaborating on her approach, the L.A.-based author says, “It’s about physical empathy, the ability to inhabit different bodies. It’s also about writing from other places within oneself besides the brain — the gut, the pussy, the subconscious — and allowing oneself to access those places without self-editing in the first draft.”

To bring about that access, Broder prefers to draft by dictating into her iPhone. She likes to write in transit, in places where she shouldn’t necessarily be writing. In New York City, where she got her MFA, she wrote poetry while riding the subway, using her iPhone’s Notes app.

In L.A., Broder writes in traffic, while shopping for groceries, or working out. “Sometimes I’ll be dictating while jogging and say, ‘It was a cock that she had no idea she had — I’d found her cock,’ and people on Santa Monica Boulevard look at me weirdly.”