“The Sorrows of Young Werther” porcelain tea and coffee sets, ca. 1790

A few years ago, my friend Marisa and I developed a morbid fascination with a set of brothers she’d somehow found on Instagram, two professional teenagers in their mid-40s who seemed to have willfully imprisoned themselves in the self-limiting vortex of Gen-X mythmaking. Though from any rational perspective, both Ben and Craig Winter were enormous losers who had blown their lives to dust before reaching the legal age of majority, their posts about drugs, teenage grudges, and the halcyon days of the Pacific Northwest’s ’90s alternative music scene stirred in the two of us a rabid scopophilia that we found impossible to quit. We were obsessed with the Winter brothers, and wiled away our leisure and office hours quietly assembling a digital inventory that documented the incremental degradation of their lives. If they seemed to have gotten stuck somewhere in our shared past, it was at least a place that Marisa and I knew; we found an inexplicable comfort in our squalid time travel, but the decade the Winters had been left malingering in was nowhere we would have wanted to stay.

We did our best to weed fiction from fact; we tried to untangle the mysterious origin of their fraternal estrangement (they would occasionally leave comments on one another’s posts expressing how they were glad to never have to interact ever again), we talked to people who’d known them during their juvenile delinquent heydays (shoutout to Leigh Ledare!), and we routinely speculated about which one was more terminally fucked up. (Spoiler: it was a dead heat). Though the brothers were absolute strangers to us in some ways, they were intimately familiar in others; I guess the truth is that on the surface they were not dissimilar from boys we’d known when we ourselves were young, the boys we’d lost track of or nearly forgotten, the ones who’d dropped out in tenth grade or died before they could make it into our senior yearbooks. As middle-aged adults, Ben and Craig served as a kind of reverse object lesson for the two of us, the clammy images they posted of their lives offering proof that it’s true what they say about people who stay too long at the party. “It’s too bad, I think we could have given them great makeovers,” Marisa said to me today when I told her I was writing about the four of us. “Still wish I had that disgusting Decline of Western Civilization shirt Ben always wore!”

The Winters almost immediately accrued a veneer of shabby celebrity for Marisa and for me, and we spent many nights breathlessly tabulating the sum of their respective losses, trying to figure out their mother’s name, looking up their old bands on the internet, and wondering if, in some other version of reality, the two of them could have found the fame they seemed to believe had been stolen from them. Ben often brooded over antique transgressions in his Brooklyn hovel, sometimes showing off pictures of his collection of morphine tablets or bragging about the time the New York Post devoted an entire column to the injuries he’d sustained when a drunken ex-girlfriend pushed him onto a train track. He wrote noirish captions about his love of crime under pictures of Social Distortion’s dancing skeleton logo, complained about how soft young people had become in the internet age, and often aired petty grievances about the well-known musicians and producers he claimed had scorned him both online and IRL. We eventually wrote to Ben via DM to ask if the stories he told were true – if he’d actually shot speedballs with Kurt Cobain hours before his suicide, if he’d really been kneecapped during the commission of a failed bank robbery, what it was like to be pushed off a subway platform at 4 a.m. by a girl you thought you loved. “I’ll tell you all about it,” he wrote back, including a photograph of a safe littered with drugs and damp-looking dollar bills. “Meet me at Atlantic Terminal, I’ll give you an interview.” We declined, and never tried to talk to him again.

Craig, though infinitely sadder, was perhaps more frightening to me in some respects, I guess because the exhaustion he wore on his face had somehow perforated his person and he no longer had the energy to even pretend. He liked to post what I assume he thought were artful pictures of himself lounging nude by the propane fireplace in his mother’s California home, the blue cast of the filter he always used exaggerating the air of spiritual doom he hauled around, and highlighting what would eventually prove to be his fatal indifference to self-care. In addition to the photographs that documented his own passion for drugs (black tar heroin, a truly heroic volume of Valium, and assorted craft beers), he also had a penchant for romanticism that Ben seemed to lack. Sometimes he posted videos of himself playing pretty shoe-gaze songs on an electric guitar, and Marisa and I would marvel at his mod haircut and his Flipper T-shirts, which seemed to indicate perfect fidelity to an era long-passed. Today I went back and counted the posts Craig made during a period when he was hoping to attract the attention of deceased Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’s daughter; there are at least ten of them scattered across his multiple accounts, each one suffering from an insular logic that emphasizes his reckless disregard for reality. “You are just as beautiful as I always knew you would be,” he wrote under a decades-old image of this woman, whose life has surely been shaped by the obsessive over-identification people feel for a father she never knew. “I know you’re scared, but you don’t have to be alone anymore,” he wrote. “I’ll wait for you.” As pathologically out of touch as it initially seemed, there was also something about this gesture that rang queasily familiar to me. Our tactics were different, but the center is maybe the same, both of us steadfast in our belief that it’s okay to use the internet to pursue communication with a person who has no idea that you exist.

I used to send emails to strangers a lot, at first simply out of curiosity, but then because it became clear that it very rarely upsets a person to hear that you’re interested in their life. I was looking through old messages recently and came across a conversation I’d initiated some years ago with a woman who had worked as a nanny for Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love when their daughter was small; I’d written to her after reading that she’d sold Cobain’s famous 1960s-era pea-green mohair cardigan at auction, some years before it hammered again at $334,000. When I contacted her, I was working on a series of essays about celebrity memorabilia and fan-culture; I told her I was interested in the story of how she’d ended up with the sweater and what it meant to own it, that I wanted to know how it felt to part with what is certainly one of Cobain’s most iconic garments (second perhaps only to the Converse One Star sneakers visible in the publicly circulating images of the musician’s dead body). “Sounds interesting,” she responded, “I’ll have to think about it.”

Last week while I read over my messages and her lone reply, I realized that maybe she did think about it. Maybe she looked up my work and saw what it is that I do; maybe it occurred to her that I was just another thief testing the locks, turning the doorknob, trying to see how much I could carry out of her house without having to make a second trip. Maybe one too many people had asked her exactly the same question, all of us greedy for proximity to the wreckage of a generation-defining tragedy that actually has nothing to do with any of us. It doesn’t really matter what her reasoning was; I never heard from her again.

I bring up the mythology of the sweater here because it seems to loop back into my thoughts about the brothers, because both stories reach toward the Sturm und Drang of a moment in America when nihilistic disenfranchisement became so commercially entrenched in our culture that we are still unable to determine the difference between what we are buying and what it is that we actually feel. As much as one might like to account for the excessive value generated by the cardigan by reducing it to symbol of ’90s nostalgia, it remains so inextricably linked to Cobain’s body that it is a metonym not only of his creative output, but also of his suicide. I thought of it last Christmas when I happened to come across an exact copy while shopping for my teenage son at the mall. Touching it, I felt struck by the continental drift that separates then from now, by the distance between Cobain’s overt rejection of capitalistic desire and the subsequent nullification of his transgression via commerce itself. I wondered if young people know what the garment once conjured, if it retains any of its rebellion. Perhaps now it’s just a 1990s pea-green cardigan, a thing stripped of its aura and returned to cultural neutrality by virtue of our lust for disaster.

It’s strange to find myself writing about the Winter brothers here, mostly because it isn’t what I intended to do. I had initially pitched an essay for this edition of Fiction/Nonfiction that considered the relationship between celebrity death, mass-market merchandising, and the Werther Effect, a term used to describe the phenomenon of the copycat suicide. Named after the rash of deaths rumored to have been instigated by the 1774 publication of Goethe’s epistolary novel, the Werther Effect suggests that suicidal contagion occurs when people misinterpret the death of a stranger – often but not always a famous one – as permission to carry out the act themselves, as though the familiarity of another person’s exhaustion or hopelessness or grief is enough to legitimize a mirrored response. I thought it was fascinating to learn that the novel was the treasured companion of Napolean Bonaparte when he embarked on his failed invasion of Egypt in 1798. I thought it even more so when I remembered that it also appears as one of the three books read by Frankenstein’s monster, as though studying a tale of suffering and romantic loss might be exactly the thing that could teach a laboratory-made creature how to become a human being. “It’s hard to be a young person,” a college student told The New York Times in the immediate aftermath of Cobain’s death, trying to explain why the event had triggered such an avalanche of despair, why so many teenagers had followed their idol into the grave. I think there is truth in the statement, and that it is hard to be young. I also think that Frankenstein’s monster might take it one step further; he might remind us that it’s hard to be a person at all.

Like the events that followed Cobain’s demise, the immense popularity of The Sorrows of Young Werther instigated not only a rash of copycat suicides, but also an early exercise in the commodification of young-adult angst. In the wake of Sorrow’s publication, people could purchase Werther trinkets and perfumes, porcelain cups, and hand-cut silhouettes, all of which were collected by fans who hoped to express their affinity for a fictional figure who seemed so real that he warranted touch. Deemed “Werther Fever,” the mania for Goethe’s book presaged our contemporary passion for cosplay by centuries, and saw fans of the tragic romance dressing up like their doomed hero in the blue jacket and yellow pants he ends his life in, as though a person could indicate that they were careening into their own death drive, as though it might be possible to announce a fatal dissatisfaction with life through sartorial code. It makes me think of the sweater and of Ben’s old band T-shirts, of the difference between the negligible impact made by a fresh Decline of Western Civilization shirt versus one that has been worn to shreds in self-destructive earnest.

I suppose I felt psychically compelled to bring up Craig and Ben in this text because both of them are dead now; Ben first, in December of 2023, and Craig himself just a few months later in July of 2024. Marisa and I learned about the events from Instagram, where we learned everything we ever knew about the brothers; the information left us saddened, but also dissatisfied, as though we expected the people closest to them to share intimate details as recklessly as the brothers had themselves. We have spent a lot of time searching for obituaries and ransacking comments sections; we have DM’d strangers and looked for any information that might extend our tenuous connection with these people who we did not know. What we have learned is that the brothers were both living in the same house when Ben died, and that they’d spent November and December posting thinly veiled barbs at one another, subtle jabs that let voyeurs like us know how miserable it is to go back to your beginnings and realize that nothing has changed at all. I find it strange and haunting and scary to think of their syncopated endings, of their mother in her California cottage, of the permission one brother’s death seemed to give the other to simply let go. It makes me think of Cobain and of Werther Fever, of that strange conflation of urgency and indifference that I can sometimes see coursing through people, some who I know, and some who I don’t.

While completing this essay on the train today, I saw a man holding onto a guitar, his scraggly blonde hair and too-tight Nirvana shirt doing their best to hide the fact that he is surely in his late 40s; that he is the same age as the Winter brothers were and likely just slightly older than I am. He was strumming a song when he looked over at me, his eyes seeming to lock in on a generational similarity that he felt between the two of us, as though he thought there could be some loop of recognition that I might understand too. “Hey,” he said to me, “are you going to New Haven?” I felt like there was something wrong with him, and then thought about my habit of writing to strangers, of how often I have believed I can understand something about a person just by looking. I sunk into my seat so that the chair in front of me became a barricade and pretended I didn’t hear him.

Alissa Bennett is a writer and has been a director at Gladstone Gallery since 2018. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, Ursula, and Vogue. Bennett is currently completing a script about the life of Edith Wharton. She teaches at the Yale School of Art and at Sarah Lawrence College.

Image credit: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, design by Johann David Schubert for Meissen