No, No, I Didn't Expect You to Remember the Underminer

by Laurie Woolever

Do you remember The Underminer? If your desk job in the early to mid aughts involved lots of unsupervised time, which you spent refreshing Gawker all day, you probably do. First a book by Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan, and later an occasional Gawker column, The Underminer was “the best friend who casually destroys your life,” an archetype I knew well but didn’t have a name for until Albo and Heffernan named it for all of us.

Why does the concept of an Underminer character feel so quaint to me now? Has rapid-paced, 24/7 microblogging (as it was once known) taken the place of a well-crafted 800-word column supposedly written by a monster who says we’re adorable when they mean we’re pathetic? Or is it that the monstrosity of American politics in the last eight years has taken the sting out of passive-aggression, since it’s now OK to just be aggressive-aggressive? Or, have we come so far in therapy culture that we now know that the monster, often as not, is also us?

I have known underminers. When I separated from my now-ex-husband, a certain neighbor, herself married to a monster, would go out of her way to tell me, “I’m rooting for you!” As if it were a given that I’d lost something I might (or might not) yet regain, and that I must be desperate to do so, ASAP.

The Ivy League university I attended was teeming with arrogantly insecure and/or insecurely arrogant undergraduate underminers. My teenage son now says to me various underminery things about this university being “the worst Ivy,” a wisecrack  he picked up watching the entirety of The Office in the first few weeks of Covid lockdown. I found myself doing the undermining myself the other day, when I told him his report card was really impressive for someone who had just shit the bed on his geometry regents.

My primal underminer is an old family “friend” whom I have known since I first became a sentient creature. She is the first person I ever heard my mother (or anyone) refer to as “a bitch.” She is competitive, petty, a score-keeper, a master of comparisons. The last time I saw her, at my mother’s funeral, she said to my nephew, “Going to community college is nothing to be ashamed of.”