Self-erasure, social media stalking, and SYMPATHY
Just about three years ago, while working at BuzzFeed, I made a quiz with my coworker Tanya called "What Level Creeper Are You?" It comprised all the creepy ways we'd stalked friends and strangers online, habits dissected and isolated and presented as a checklist for others to say, oh hey, I do that, too. My boss at the time screenshot one item and tweeted it to me, saying, "GET OUT OF MY MIND." It was:
It was one of those things so mundane as to never register among habits worth analyzing, embarrassing enough that I'd never thought to see if others did it too. But, it turned out (as most things do) to be very common. My neuroses are never as special as I think they are! This realization is a consistent, humbling source of a relief.
In Olivia Sudjic's Sympathy — a novel which explores what happens when internet stalking goes unchecked — I was overcome by moments of recognizing myself, feeling understood and seen, but never relieved. Reading about Alice Hare, the protagonist whose obsession — which grows from curiosity about an enigmatic writer, to social media stalking, to deep internet stalking, to a precarious and calculated real-life relationship — made me feel, for a good portion of the story, one sentiment: There but for the grace of god.
Which is why I think it's funny that early reviews of the novel focus on how alienating the main characters might be. Library Journal called out them out for their "narcissism and need for external validation" and said readers less attuned to social media might "find it hard to sympathize" with them. Which, like, fair, but I can't imagine someone reading about Alice Hare and not seeing a version of themselves pushed to the extreme. And to read her obsession as evidence of dangerous narcissism, or a (tired) cautionary tale about how the devices meant to bring us closer together are only serving to alienate us from each other, is to shut out Sudjic's explorations of how such timeless, human yearnings can lead us astray: looking for community, we become obsessed with approval; looking for happiness, we become obsessed with success; looking for actualization, we all but obliterate the self.
So here's what happens, without giving too much away. (Sudjic is masterful in jumping around the timeline, teasing out what we know is soon to come.) Alice Hare is a British college graduate who's kind of a misfit, not sure what to do with her life. She takes her grandmother up on an offer to move to New York and live with her, which is where she starts to realize how much of the world is out there. She's both entranced and overwhelmed by the open newness of the city, the seemingly limitless opportunities to create herself anew, and after some months, she finds Mizuko Himura, an enigmatic Japanese writer, living and teaching in NYC, with a cult following and a prolific internet presence. As Alice digs deeper into Mizuko's writings and interviews and posts, she finds more and more connections between their families and lives, more ways their lives have been fated to intersect, more evidence that Mizuko's is a life big and powerful enough to swallow her own — and that Alice would be so lucky to be swallowed.
And honestly? Girl, SAME! Tell me you haven't become obsessed with a minor celeb or a friend of a friend or even just a total stranger and been like, "oh shit we would be best friends." Or "oh shit I want her life." And, especially if you're depressive or obsessive by nature, how easy to become hooked on that optimism, that certainty that somehow this person, this character, holds a key to your happiness, whether by connection or emulation! The belief that the only way to improve one's self is to toss it aside and become someone else. For Alice, Mizuko is that someone else:
My attachment to her was cultivated through her pictures and photographs and quotes and all the things she put online, not just because of what they were and how they related to me, but because of the attitude, the way of seeing the world they suggested. The way she saw and spoke about things was the exact way I wished I could see and speak about things. I began to try to look at plain, ordinary-seeming things the way I thought she might look at them and so try to remake them like she did.
Of course, the problem here is that the person Alice is emulating is a fabrication herself. What Sudjic gets at is the insufficiency of social media as a way of knowing another person, but that isn't a surprise — it's merely a tool to show the impossibility of really knowing another person, full stop. Social media just offers a convenient and convincing substitute, a way for a person who is already deeply lost to separate from her self, and allow herself to be subsumed.
And, to go back to that first thing, the CREEP QUIZ, it's not just about seeing the world through someone else's eyes; it's about seeing oneself that way, too. When she finds an in into the world of creatives and tech "disrupters" (which oh my god Sudjic just nails; her skewering of the self-satisfied Dwight — whose business cards read, "Innovation Consultant, App Developer, Apiarist," who will never miss an opportunity to pivot a conversation toward his "expertise," who is mostly interested in getting "another degree, in thought" — is a surprising source of real comedy) and starts to gather her own modest following on Instagram, Alice reevaluates herself:
"Alice Hare," I imagined people I no longer knew saying to each other, "is living in New York, is definitely not a virgin, has a boyfriend in tech, and hangs out with tattooed young people who drink black drinks that have charcoal as an active ingredient."
The process of manipulating a life to present it as something slightly askew of its reality becomes commonplace, and it leads seamlessly into Alice's own inability to distinguish what's real from what isn't, and then what's appropriate from what isn't — and once she successfully meets and seduces Mizuko, she (and we) can't shake the fragility of their relationship, the sense that any second it will implode. It makes for really exciting, nerve-wracking (racking? I never know, honestly) reading.
Can you tell I loved this book? I loved this book. It's creepy, yes, but only because it is (at least for a good portion — the finale goes a little off the rails) so plausible. Alice is narcissistic in the way that anyone is who is trying to know themselves in relation to the world around them. I see nothing but yearning in Alice. I see nothing but a desperation to connect, to feel worth. Maybe that's because I'm pretty certain I too have the capacity for some kind of frenzied bout of obsession come to life, and it's just waiting to erupt. WE SHALL SEE.
Bits & Pieces
Anyone else obsessively think about which would be worse, to freeze to death or burn to death? Just me? I always though freezing to death seemed like a kind of passive (dare I say peaceful?) way to go, but according to this TERRIFYING short story "Frozen Alive" maybe I'm wrong!!!!! I guess my choice continues to be: neither, please.
Loved Ariel Levy's profile of Catherine Opie, whose photographs, Levy says, "ask how sure we are about what we know to be true." About her work in general, and her portraits of football players in particular, Opie says: "There's a certain kind of equality I'm trying to create, which is what I believe American democracy is about... If I were to pass judgment on, say, football players— that they were the asshole kids who used to beat me up in high school — that's not really looking."
Okay I know this is just begging to be written on a mug in that inescapable font, but Pamela Abalu, in an interview with Real Simple, said, "Fear is imagination used for the wrong purpose," and I felt it HARD!
Kirkus said some nice things about my book, Public Relations, which is coming out very soon!! Like that it's "Cinderella for the modern age," written "with wit and charm." You can read the review, and find links to preorder it, here!
Okay, that's all. <3