Messages I Should Have Sent is an unfiltered peek into one of pop culture's quietest "loudmouth" authors. Tyler Appel's debut poetry book is a departure from the humorous caricatured persona (from his previous books) that the world has come to know. Appel's latest effort is a collection of poems and essays dealing with love, loss, and processing everything that comes with them.
Infidelity, sickness, cursed engagements, and a yacht club murder mystery are just a few of many themes that Appel spins into a web of lighthearted but emotional writing depictions of navigating life as a young man in Los Angeles.
As was the case for so many, the pandemic forced a stark reevaluation of what mattered to Appel-and when it came to writing, that meant tapping into a frankness and candor (mostly the product of major personal life shake ups), as well as a greater sense of autonomy as he shaped the concept and aesthetic of the book.
"One thing that experience did do was that it stripped back a lot of layers of tolerating anything that's less than real because I didn't have the energy to tolerate anything that was less than genuine and authentic at that time," he says. (Another factor in Appel's willingness to let down his guard may have been the social media maelstrom that followed false accusations of bullying by a "she-who-shall-not-be-named" pop starlet.)
Where Messages I Should Have Sent departs from Appel's previous efforts from years past, however, is in its straight up raw emotional bluntness, where readers meet Tyler Appel, the person not his pop culture persona, for the first time. It feels like the most fully realized vision -and the most rounded portrait of Appel as a human-yet. "I would hope that if someone had never read a book of mine, and they picked up this book, they would leave it feeling like they not only just got coffee with me, but also start to dig deeper within themselves" he says.
Messages I Should Have Sent takes readers through a journey of the most bitter relatable moments in a young adult's life and finds sweetness in them because this book teaches us that there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
