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I'm a Fan
I'M A FAN tells the story of an unnamed narrator's involvement in a toxic affair. Endlessly scrolling through the social media profiles of her boyfriend's girlfriend, her obsession with the couple spirals out of control.
With a clear and unforgiving eye, Sheena Patel makes startling connections between power struggles at the heart of human relationships to those in the wider world, offering a devastating critique of social media, patriarchy, and class structures.
With a clear and unforgiving eye, Sheena Patel makes startling connections between power struggles at the heart of human relationships to those in the wider world, offering a devastating critique of social media, patriarchy, and class structures.
218 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2022
About the author
Sheena Patel
2 books260 followersSheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for film and TV who was born and raised in North West London. She is part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective, has been published in a pamphlet collection, 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE (Rough Trade Books 2020), a poetry collection of the same name (FEM Press 2018) and has a poem published in the anthologies Slam! You’re Gonna Wanna Hear This chosen by Nikita Gill and She Will Soar edited by Ana Sampson (Pan Macmillan 2020.) In 2022 she was chosen as one of the Observer’s Top 10 best debut novelists. I’m A Fan (Rough Trade Books) is her first book.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,956 reviews
December 19, 2023
girl let him GO
April 24, 2023
I am, well, a fan of this one. Sheena Patel has written a scorching social critique that touches on male entitlement, social media fixation, asymmetrical relationships, and the patriarchal (and racist) social structure that holds it all in place. The story takes its cues from the bevy of books featuring a messy millennial protagonist who doesn't quite have their life together, struggling against a system that locks them out of the material standing older generations took for granted. But where Patel departs from other books of this type is with a move away from the narrative of personal struggle to one focused on systems. Patel's narrator is self-aware from the start. She knows exactly what she is up against and isn’t distracted by personal failings even when engaging in what an older paradigm might call self-destructive behavior. The change she calls for isn't about personal growth, but instead a structural upending of a toxic online and irl culture. The most powerful passages lift the lid on the fictional story to speak directly and candidly. This is I suspect a harbinger of a new type of fiction, one that cares less about story beats, character arcs, and buried themes - and is more explicitly political with urgency and clarity. In this way and others, Patel eschews a traditional narrative arc, departing from the received novel form in important ways to make this all the more radical. Published by Rough Trade Books, I read this last summer when it was still under the radar. It's been exciting to watch it catch on with a larger audience.
January 15, 2023
Just not terribly enjoyable, I'm afraid. I was open to something fresh and millennial with a keen eye for racist microaggressions and a wry take on 21st century relationships and our relationship to celebrity. Instead I got endless wingeing about how difficult it is to be alone in your 30s when you have missed every opportunity to grow up and sort your life out. It was all dreadfully self-indulgent and pathetic. Nobody could sympathize with a person like this. Nobody would want to be friends with a person like this. There was nothing relatable about an awful person who cheats on her boyfriend for a relationship with the King of RED FLAGS whose banner, a red flag, is carried high and proudly by his wife and the other mistresses with whom he has mind-blowing sex and texts you about. Is this really what is going on? Are people genuinely this stupid? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean I care to read about their stupid lives and their Insta stalking. This was not shocking, not transgressive and not in the slightest bit original or entertaining. It's wanky autofiction-lite that someone told the author was "brave".
April 30, 2024
i hope I'M a fan...of this book!
update: well.
this had roughly as much depth as an instagram post, which is fitting because its most interesting sections take place on the platform.
we follow an obsessive woman, cheating on her boyfriend with "the man she wants to be with," who in addition to a wife and several other unimportant affairs is entwined with "the woman she is obsessed with," which extends mostly to following her on instagram.
nothing changes over the course of this book. characters remain inconsistent without growth. there are SO many unearned style choices, which in the last 3 weeks has become my pet peeve.
i didn't hate this, and it had really promising elements, but it disappointed me. which in some ways is worse.
bottom line: this is short but still too long.
2.5
update: well.
this had roughly as much depth as an instagram post, which is fitting because its most interesting sections take place on the platform.
we follow an obsessive woman, cheating on her boyfriend with "the man she wants to be with," who in addition to a wife and several other unimportant affairs is entwined with "the woman she is obsessed with," which extends mostly to following her on instagram.
nothing changes over the course of this book. characters remain inconsistent without growth. there are SO many unearned style choices, which in the last 3 weeks has become my pet peeve.
i didn't hate this, and it had really promising elements, but it disappointed me. which in some ways is worse.
bottom line: this is short but still too long.
2.5
May 4, 2023
I was not a fan
April 23, 2023
1/16 in my Women’s Prize 2023 rankings. My Bookstagram brief review and GR/book themed photo here:
https://instagram.com/p/CrYeo2Topvd/
Longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize, 2023 Jhalak Prize and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Foyles Book of the Year 2022
Oyler meets Rooney meets Lockwood but wrapped in a searing examination of white privilege and how it interacts with the worlds of art (including literature) in a social media age.
This book, published by the small press Rough Trade Books (associated with the record company of the same name) featured in the 2022 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney and Gail Honeyman among many others). This year’s list also had Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Emilie Pine, Moses McKenzie, Jo Browning Wroe, Louise Kennedy (all of whose books I enjoyed to varying extents) but this may be the strongest on the list (albeit the list I think had a literally spectacular miss in omitting Maddie Mortimer and her Golden Reviewer Book of the Year “Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies”).
The book is narrated in a series of short but intensely interior chapters (with headings sometimes drawn from social media memes or the work of conceptual artists) by the narrator – a 30 ish year old, second generation immigrant, non-white woman ostensibly living in South London with her long suffering (but by her view inadequate) boyfriend, working in various freelance roles in the arts world but who equally could be said to occupy the millennial world of social media – particularly Instagram.
The book opens with her stating “I stalk a woman on the Internet who is sleeping with the same man I am” and these two characters who quickly become “The woman I am obsessed with” and “the man I want to be with” dominate her thoughts and mental energies.
The second of these is a famous artist, of who the narrator was a fan and who she successfully engineered into a relationship which has now metamorphosised into a very asymmetrical if not to say manipulative relationship as she is desperate to be with him and he keeps her at a safe distance (even stopping sleeping with her) while carrying on with his marriage and at least two other affairs.
One of these is of course with “the woman I am obsessed with” a white American Instagram influencer with a large following seemingly by virtue of her proximity to fame, her father’s reputation and, of course, her white skin.
Many of the chapters rove across the narrators relationship with the “man” over time and the ways in which he has manipulated her, and her obsession with the “woman” and her Instagram-perfect life of organic and market food, designer furniture and clothing (including her own promotion of brands) and six-figure advance for her upcoming book – all of which contrast with the narrator’s failure to even convince a bank she has a steady enough income to justify a mortgage.
Mixed in with this is often searing social commentary – on male/female power dynamics but particularly scathing attacks on the world of white privilege. My view on these sections was contradictory. In most cases I found them by far the strongest of the book (one section in particular “there’s no business like” in itself made the book a must-read and both my opening and closing quotes are taken from it) but I did also think they sometimes slightly jarred with the remainder of the book not thematically (the author cleverly links the idea of imbalanced power structures across social media fan-dom/followers, colonialism and racism and male-female relationships) but stylistically - at times they felt like non-fictional essays by the author inserted under the auspices of her narrator’s thoughts (albeit a very analytical and aware narrator).
And further, I sometimes struggled with how to reconcile the narrator’s very awareness of these systemic and in-built/hard to counter power imbalances with her voluntary decision to subject herself to an unnecessary power imbalance by pursuing and then clinging to a relationship with a clearly unfeeling and unworthy of her man (particularly while at the same time betraying her own boyfriend). And this leads to another issue I had with the book – which reminded me of my similar views on Rooney’s “Conversation With Friends” – there really are no likeable characters in this book.
Nevertheless this was a memorable read as well as a challenging one – particularly in thinking if as a white man I really even have the right to opine on the book or render my heart-felt opinion that I hope to see it featuring on literary prize lists or whether I am merely tokenising.
https://instagram.com/p/CrYeo2Topvd/
Longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize, 2023 Jhalak Prize and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Foyles Book of the Year 2022
We [second generation immigrants] make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels, memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home, of how we all feel ugly.of the mixed relationships we enter with white people, losing our language from a culture we had a tenuous hold of in the first place, we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim.
For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness--by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime- like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal), the threat of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child. Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neocolonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being 'in service to our 'communities'.
Oyler meets Rooney meets Lockwood but wrapped in a searing examination of white privilege and how it interacts with the worlds of art (including literature) in a social media age.
This book, published by the small press Rough Trade Books (associated with the record company of the same name) featured in the 2022 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney and Gail Honeyman among many others). This year’s list also had Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Emilie Pine, Moses McKenzie, Jo Browning Wroe, Louise Kennedy (all of whose books I enjoyed to varying extents) but this may be the strongest on the list (albeit the list I think had a literally spectacular miss in omitting Maddie Mortimer and her Golden Reviewer Book of the Year “Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies”).
The book is narrated in a series of short but intensely interior chapters (with headings sometimes drawn from social media memes or the work of conceptual artists) by the narrator – a 30 ish year old, second generation immigrant, non-white woman ostensibly living in South London with her long suffering (but by her view inadequate) boyfriend, working in various freelance roles in the arts world but who equally could be said to occupy the millennial world of social media – particularly Instagram.
The book opens with her stating “I stalk a woman on the Internet who is sleeping with the same man I am” and these two characters who quickly become “The woman I am obsessed with” and “the man I want to be with” dominate her thoughts and mental energies.
The second of these is a famous artist, of who the narrator was a fan and who she successfully engineered into a relationship which has now metamorphosised into a very asymmetrical if not to say manipulative relationship as she is desperate to be with him and he keeps her at a safe distance (even stopping sleeping with her) while carrying on with his marriage and at least two other affairs.
One of these is of course with “the woman I am obsessed with” a white American Instagram influencer with a large following seemingly by virtue of her proximity to fame, her father’s reputation and, of course, her white skin.
Many of the chapters rove across the narrators relationship with the “man” over time and the ways in which he has manipulated her, and her obsession with the “woman” and her Instagram-perfect life of organic and market food, designer furniture and clothing (including her own promotion of brands) and six-figure advance for her upcoming book – all of which contrast with the narrator’s failure to even convince a bank she has a steady enough income to justify a mortgage.
Mixed in with this is often searing social commentary – on male/female power dynamics but particularly scathing attacks on the world of white privilege. My view on these sections was contradictory. In most cases I found them by far the strongest of the book (one section in particular “there’s no business like” in itself made the book a must-read and both my opening and closing quotes are taken from it) but I did also think they sometimes slightly jarred with the remainder of the book not thematically (the author cleverly links the idea of imbalanced power structures across social media fan-dom/followers, colonialism and racism and male-female relationships) but stylistically - at times they felt like non-fictional essays by the author inserted under the auspices of her narrator’s thoughts (albeit a very analytical and aware narrator).
And further, I sometimes struggled with how to reconcile the narrator’s very awareness of these systemic and in-built/hard to counter power imbalances with her voluntary decision to subject herself to an unnecessary power imbalance by pursuing and then clinging to a relationship with a clearly unfeeling and unworthy of her man (particularly while at the same time betraying her own boyfriend). And this leads to another issue I had with the book – which reminded me of my similar views on Rooney’s “Conversation With Friends” – there really are no likeable characters in this book.
Nevertheless this was a memorable read as well as a challenging one – particularly in thinking if as a white man I really even have the right to opine on the book or render my heart-felt opinion that I hope to see it featuring on literary prize lists or whether I am merely tokenising.
The easiest route to build a following is to penetrate culture and the fastest way to do this is to tell them the story they want to hear -the one about our assimilation to whiteness or the abhorrence, or failure of this assimilation so white people with the keys to the castle can gasp and shake their heads and say, I never knew it was this bad, it's insert year| for God's sake, and then will lower the drawbridge to let us in? We know succumbing to this will secure us the status we seek. It is how we can have a 'name', we can sit on the panels and talk about diversity, come up with earnest solutions inside historic buildings in front of a rapt echo-chambered public which will never amount to anything except feeling good about ourselves for how terrible we feel at the state of the world, it becomes the workshops we run, the books we write when we yell, we know what Britain really is and you don't, buy my book to find out the Truth. A fanbase is how we will get the advances, how we secure the invitations to prestigious awards, headline one of the smaller tents at the bigger literary festivals or one day maybe we will even get to cosplay at being a gatekeeper by becoming one of the judges of a well-regarded prize. We think explaining ourselves or justifying our existence isn't too heavy a price to pay to gain entry through those gilded gates where liberal artsy white people will tokenise us as a symbol of their ideological progress - they can think they are so exotic for being into your work, aren't they so edgy, so underground or else most likely they will tip-toe around us, deferential but still exclusionary, it's not such a high price for admittance to the cultural establishment, we reason.
May 7, 2023
a lot of words to say very little, I feel as if there was an interesting commentary in there somewhere about race and misogyny but it was lost under so much endless whinging
September 17, 2022
3.5 stars
A manic, hectic, neurotic rant of a book, with an up-to-the-moment hipster urban vibe. Part of me is tiring a bit of all these piecemeal books chopped up into little fragments, a nod to social media attention spans, I guess, even though here certain types of social influencers are themselves under a critical spotlight.
But another part of me can't help but relate to Patel's narrator who makes sometimes astute, sometimes forced, connections between messed up relationships (she's obsessed with the woman her sometime-lover sometimes sleeps with) and wider social and cultural toxicities of our moment.
Unsubtle and in your face, this has a frantic pace and a restless, prowling, growling mood - it can get a bit exhausting but is also a compact and confrontational piece of writing, exhilarating at its best. 3.5 stars rounded up.
A manic, hectic, neurotic rant of a book, with an up-to-the-moment hipster urban vibe. Part of me is tiring a bit of all these piecemeal books chopped up into little fragments, a nod to social media attention spans, I guess, even though here certain types of social influencers are themselves under a critical spotlight.
But another part of me can't help but relate to Patel's narrator who makes sometimes astute, sometimes forced, connections between messed up relationships (she's obsessed with the woman her sometime-lover sometimes sleeps with) and wider social and cultural toxicities of our moment.
Unsubtle and in your face, this has a frantic pace and a restless, prowling, growling mood - it can get a bit exhausting but is also a compact and confrontational piece of writing, exhilarating at its best. 3.5 stars rounded up.
May 21, 2023
me, reading this: me.
June 10, 2024
A propulsive novel. A scorching novel. A novel with a powerful, turbocharged voice. A novel where Sheena Patel told an interviewer that she wanted to write “about shame and darkness and things you don't want to admit to yourself” - so much so, she “wanted the reader to feel sick.”
Sound appealing? Actually, this is a highly distinctive, well-written novel that's hard to put down. We have a unnamed narrator, a thirtysomething woman of color, a second-generation immigrant living in London, who zeros in on two individuals, a woman and a man - “the woman I am obsessed with” and “the man I want to be with.”
The woman is a Gwyneth Paltrow-type, wealthy, talented, beautiful, and, most notably, white. She has her own line of exceedingly expensive, high-end products, tens of thousands of online followers, and is the daughter of a famous American. The narrator obsessively follows her on the internet, sometimes refreshing her page fifteen times a minute.
The man, older and married, is a famous artist who has had and still maintains a relationship of sorts with the woman the narrator is obsessed with. Although the narrator lives with her boyfriend, she also desires a deeper relationship with the man she wants to be with.
Thus, we are provided with the framework. To delve into the more specific, often bitter and gnarly taste of the unfolding frenetic drama, I will connect my comments to several of Sheena Patel's chapter headings (in italics) and the narrator's actual words.
dick from someone who doesn't care if you live or die
“He says the sex is too intense between us which is why we don't do it anymore. He has a beautiful cock – straight and thick and very long. When he used to let me fuck him, he would be so deep inside me I could map the edges of my cervix, I had to ask him to go very slow as my eyes rolled back to moan.”
The narrator knows on some level the man she wants to be with is a superficial lout who uses women as objects to work out his own childish, selfish issues, but she continues to desire him so she can, among other reasons tied in with status, race and social inequality, spit her venom and express her rage.
“I ask him if he's heard from the woman I am obsessed with and he says no. I say, her book has come out, she's doing tons of interviews. He says, I know, someone I'm friends with in America sent me a link to one of them and it's cringe, I can't bear to look at it. I don't tell him how I've been monitoring her book release like I'm planning a drone strike.”
Shenna Patel intentionally made her narrator horrible, unappealing in the extreme. But, and this is a critical point, the author did not want to cast her protagonist as a victim or someone the reader would feel sorry for.
roll me one
“Our living room turns green and I spin forward in time and a voice says to me, you have to leave him. I do the maths very quickly. I turn thirty-one this year, and I'm on a slide to forty. If I do it when I'm thirty-five it'll be dangerous for me and if that's the case then why wait, it has to be now.”
The narrator can see quite clearly that women, unlike men, are on a biological clock, yet one more example of the emotional cruelty women must suffer in a patriarchal, male-dominated society.
i might look innocent but I screenshot a lot
“Sometimes I think about what I could do for revenge. Sometimes I think about posting a letter to his wife and in it I will write in black sharpie, he's fucked the woman I am obsessed with in your bed.”
In our media saturated world, there's little doubt how much our involvement and interface with computers, iPhones, apps, texts, email has become intertwined with our flesh and blood dealings with people. This is underscored when, later in the chapter, the narrator tells us, “The man I want to be with texts and he says he understands if I don't want to carry on with this after everything he has told me. I text back straightaway and say, I do.”
i'm proud ov you
“It takes me a long time to realize that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.”
Oh, such a realization! To recognize this man, this great artist, is using your skin color to define himself in others' perceptions and judgments. I did mention he's a superficial lout back there.
normalize saying, for a yt person, after complimenting yt people
“This is whiteness. It is everywhere, pervasive, its assumption that it needs to be there to sanitize, to give order by creating a hierarchy. Whiteness on its own is empty, it is forceful in its insistence of its peculiar quality of absence. It refuses to be described in and of itself and instead it needs some other thing to define itself against....Whiteness is nihilistic, it is the distilled form of the death drive and because it has a cold separation to life, it believes it alone is able to categorise, is the one to get rid of the excess, the one to do the accounts, to formulate the systems that regulate the chaos, to decide who lives and who dies – it alone can shoulder this responsibility it made up for itself, so anxiously adrift it is without purpose.”
The narrator frequently peppers her own existential struggles with scathing sociological/cultural/psychological observations. In this way, Sheena Patel has expanded what it means to write a traditional narrative.
I highly recommend I'm a Fan. There's also an audiobook available where Sheena Patel is the narrator.
Sheena Patel, writer and assistant director for film and TV, born and raised in London
April 19, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland
Longlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize
Foyles Book of the Year
For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime—like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal), the threat of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child.
I'm A Fan is the debut novel by Sheena Patel, part of the poetry collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write.
The novel is published by Rough Trade Books, associated with but independent of the famous Record label:
And I'm A Fan is certainly original. It begins in a chapter headed "do i":
I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am. Sometimes when I am too quick to look at her stories, I block her temporarily so she doesn’t know I absent-mindedly refresh her page fifteen times a minute while Netflix plays in the background on my laptop, my stomach flipping sick with delight when her profile picture is ringed red. She has tens of thousands of followers, is verified, and is the daughter of someone famous in America. An endless stream of white people fawn in the comments under her posts. She has opinions about household objects which I have never given a thought to before; firm taste in the types of beeswax candles to burn, lays exquisite cloth on her table in anticipation of dinner, knows where to buy limited edition pottery from well-regarded potters, she will happily spend $300 on a vase where she displays really, really organic fennel flowers, by which she says there is organic and then organic.
The female narrator, early 30s and a 'second-generation immigrant', is in a relationship of sorts with 'the man I want to be with', a married man with other lovers as well, one of which 'the woman I am obsessed with' she cyberstalks: I don't tell him how I've been monitoring her book release like I'm planning a drone strike.
The story proceeds in a series of short vignettes, not always chronologically. Her narration is often coruscating. On the 'the woman I am obsessed with', who carefully carates her priviliged white life on social media:
Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures which decimate the cultures those objects are from?
Much of the novel also covers her relationship with 'the man I want to be with, transfixed by his indecision ... all these women waiting on his word, one which also models societal issues: When I pointlessly argue and fight with him, I feel like I am fighting the very structures of the old colonial forces, where he has, holds and takes, and I give, offer and ask for nothing in return.
And on her own desire for acceptance, as a writer, by the literary establishment, and why the literary establishment might welcome her as somehow validating their privilige - this perhaps the book's most striking passage:
The easiest route to build a following is to penetrate culture and the fastest way to do this is to tell them the story they want to hear—the one about our assimilation to whiteness or the abhorrence, or failure of this assimilation so white people with the keys to the castle can gasp and shake their heads and say, I never knew it was this bad, it‘s [insert year] for God‘s sake, and then will lower the drawbridge to let us in? We know succumbing to this will secure us the status we seek. It is how we can have a ‘name’, we can sit on the panels and talk about ‘diversity’, come up with earnest solutions inside historic buildings in front of a rapt echo-chambered public which will never amount to anything except feeling good about ourselves for how terrible we feel at the state of the world, it becomes the workshops we run, the books we write when we yell, we know what Britain really is and you don‘t, buy my book to find out the Truth. A fanbase is how we will get the advances, how we secure the invitations to prestigious awards, headline one of the smaller tents at the bigger literary festivals or one day maybe we will even get to cosplay at being a gatekeeper by becoming one of the judges of a well-regarded prize. We think explaining ourselves or justifying our existence isn’t too heavy a price to pay to gain entry through those gilded gates where liberal artsy white people will tokenise us as a symbol of their ideological progress—they can think they are so exotic for being into your work, aren‘t they so edgy, so underground or else most likely they will tip-toe around us, deferential but still exclusionary, it’s not such a high price for admittance to the cultural establishment, we reason.
From an interview with the author:
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-cul...
Two wonderful Guardian reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Stunning. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.
Longlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize
Foyles Book of the Year
For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime—like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal), the threat of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child.
I'm A Fan is the debut novel by Sheena Patel, part of the poetry collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write.
The novel is published by Rough Trade Books, associated with but independent of the famous Record label:
Rough Trade Books is a publishing house brought to you by the minds behind Rough Trade Records.
This new adventure in ‘capitalism’ is in the spirit of the pioneering independent record label, trading books and other wares of the same originality and radical direction.
And I'm A Fan is certainly original. It begins in a chapter headed "do i":
I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am. Sometimes when I am too quick to look at her stories, I block her temporarily so she doesn’t know I absent-mindedly refresh her page fifteen times a minute while Netflix plays in the background on my laptop, my stomach flipping sick with delight when her profile picture is ringed red. She has tens of thousands of followers, is verified, and is the daughter of someone famous in America. An endless stream of white people fawn in the comments under her posts. She has opinions about household objects which I have never given a thought to before; firm taste in the types of beeswax candles to burn, lays exquisite cloth on her table in anticipation of dinner, knows where to buy limited edition pottery from well-regarded potters, she will happily spend $300 on a vase where she displays really, really organic fennel flowers, by which she says there is organic and then organic.
The female narrator, early 30s and a 'second-generation immigrant', is in a relationship of sorts with 'the man I want to be with', a married man with other lovers as well, one of which 'the woman I am obsessed with' she cyberstalks: I don't tell him how I've been monitoring her book release like I'm planning a drone strike.
The story proceeds in a series of short vignettes, not always chronologically. Her narration is often coruscating. On the 'the woman I am obsessed with', who carefully carates her priviliged white life on social media:
Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures which decimate the cultures those objects are from?
Much of the novel also covers her relationship with 'the man I want to be with, transfixed by his indecision ... all these women waiting on his word, one which also models societal issues: When I pointlessly argue and fight with him, I feel like I am fighting the very structures of the old colonial forces, where he has, holds and takes, and I give, offer and ask for nothing in return.
And on her own desire for acceptance, as a writer, by the literary establishment, and why the literary establishment might welcome her as somehow validating their privilige - this perhaps the book's most striking passage:
The easiest route to build a following is to penetrate culture and the fastest way to do this is to tell them the story they want to hear—the one about our assimilation to whiteness or the abhorrence, or failure of this assimilation so white people with the keys to the castle can gasp and shake their heads and say, I never knew it was this bad, it‘s [insert year] for God‘s sake, and then will lower the drawbridge to let us in? We know succumbing to this will secure us the status we seek. It is how we can have a ‘name’, we can sit on the panels and talk about ‘diversity’, come up with earnest solutions inside historic buildings in front of a rapt echo-chambered public which will never amount to anything except feeling good about ourselves for how terrible we feel at the state of the world, it becomes the workshops we run, the books we write when we yell, we know what Britain really is and you don‘t, buy my book to find out the Truth. A fanbase is how we will get the advances, how we secure the invitations to prestigious awards, headline one of the smaller tents at the bigger literary festivals or one day maybe we will even get to cosplay at being a gatekeeper by becoming one of the judges of a well-regarded prize. We think explaining ourselves or justifying our existence isn’t too heavy a price to pay to gain entry through those gilded gates where liberal artsy white people will tokenise us as a symbol of their ideological progress—they can think they are so exotic for being into your work, aren‘t they so edgy, so underground or else most likely they will tip-toe around us, deferential but still exclusionary, it’s not such a high price for admittance to the cultural establishment, we reason.
From an interview with the author:
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-cul...
Q: There’s a violence in the world that modern books – fiction and nonfiction alike – seem to engage with almost ambiently, but I’m A Fan confronts head-on. In terms of gender, novelists like Sally Rooney unpick desire and power through quiet waif characters who mostly turn that violence in on themselves ...
A: Sheena Patel: That ambient violence, that softly-softly, is absolutely the privilege of a white character in my humble opinion. The veneer of respectability and politeness disguises violence and the often shameful ways we are with one another. My narrator is on the sharp end of the world, she’s very angry, very dispossessed, an observer on the internet, a fan. Her voice felt slow and then, suddenly, it was as if I was alone with her and she drove everything, she’s bitter and clever and furious.
Two wonderful Guardian reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Stunning. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.
April 16, 2024
so important to see hater representation in contemporary literature ❤️
June 10, 2024
4.25/5
To było tak dziwne, niepokojące, niekomfortowe i angażujące. Życie życiem innych, pragnienie tego co mają i chora obsesja na punkcie mężczyzny to tylko wierzchołek góry lodowej, jaką jest ta książka.
To było tak dziwne, niepokojące, niekomfortowe i angażujące. Życie życiem innych, pragnienie tego co mają i chora obsesja na punkcie mężczyzny to tylko wierzchołek góry lodowej, jaką jest ta książka.
May 13, 2024
Patel���s solo debut brings a unique and powerful voice. A spiralling triangle (more like a hexagon) of love and hate (what a beautiful combination!). A mismatched reciprocity. The protagonist a woman, second generation immigrant confused and distressed at being imprisoned by her gender and race; fear of not having control over the meaning of herself, feeling trapped on her own skin. Frustrated with The Woman She Is Obsessed With (over her white privilege) and The Man She Wants To Be With (over his male privilege). Longing for an incompatible life, an intimacy for all the wrong reasons (for she cannot reach fulfilment). A paradox of strength, pride with low self-esteem. Her life a perpetual pendulum swinging endlessly on the verge of passion and conformity.
The algorithm of life doesn't add up; the storyline is incomplete. She can't let go.
What a rare find - thank you all my GR friends for the recommendation.
The algorithm of life doesn't add up; the storyline is incomplete. She can't let go.
What a rare find - thank you all my GR friends for the recommendation.
February 1, 2023
Theoretically, I should not have liked I'm A Fan (2022) very much. It ticks quite a few boxes on the What Annoys Jola in Books list but oddly, it won my heart.
It took me a while to identify what makes this novel irresistible. I think it is the fierce and passionate tone of the narration and honesty lined with anger every time the author unmasks the falsehood, artificiality and superfluousness of today's world, including social media. Sheena Patel's prose is sensual and intimate with a slightly nihilistic vibe and caustic humour. Her depiction of the Instagram idol phenomenon is flawless and shockingly truthful. Hilarious and scary at the same time.
I'm A Fan is also an uncompromising and ruthless study of a toxic relationship and emotional atrophy. The way the narrator's obsession was depicted is impressive. The man the narrator is crazy about, the manipulative womanizer slash energetic vampire, was portrayed masterfully also. The woman's infatuation stands in stark contrast with her feminist views, wit and erudition. I'm A Fan is not populated with likeable characters but clearly, it is not their mission to compel our affection. They are caricatures representing some bitter truths about our world.
I loved the way the title metaphor was played out. On the most literal level, it refers to the narrator's disturbing fascination with one of the characters' Instagram account. Besides, it also accurately describes the relationship between her and her moody lover, with logical thinking completely switched off, irrational decisions ruling her world and an intense fixation flourishing: I am a part of a chaste harem, a supply of crazed female attention he likes to disturb when he's bored. Being a fan, passive and observant, with no critical thought, is also a philosophical concept discussed in the novel.
Am I a fan of Sheena Patel's debut novel? Not a diehard, to be honest. The rawness and neuroticism of the monologue were sometimes too much, to say nothing of the narrator's naivety and emotional numbness which I found infuriating. Nevertheless, from now on Sheena Patel will be on my radar. I am very grateful to Vesna whose stellar review inspired me to read this book. I was happy to see I'm A Fan on the Republic of Consciousness Prize (which happens to be my favourite literary award) longlist announced today.
The Beatles' fans.
[Source]
It took me a while to identify what makes this novel irresistible. I think it is the fierce and passionate tone of the narration and honesty lined with anger every time the author unmasks the falsehood, artificiality and superfluousness of today's world, including social media. Sheena Patel's prose is sensual and intimate with a slightly nihilistic vibe and caustic humour. Her depiction of the Instagram idol phenomenon is flawless and shockingly truthful. Hilarious and scary at the same time.
I'm A Fan is also an uncompromising and ruthless study of a toxic relationship and emotional atrophy. The way the narrator's obsession was depicted is impressive. The man the narrator is crazy about, the manipulative womanizer slash energetic vampire, was portrayed masterfully also. The woman's infatuation stands in stark contrast with her feminist views, wit and erudition. I'm A Fan is not populated with likeable characters but clearly, it is not their mission to compel our affection. They are caricatures representing some bitter truths about our world.
I loved the way the title metaphor was played out. On the most literal level, it refers to the narrator's disturbing fascination with one of the characters' Instagram account. Besides, it also accurately describes the relationship between her and her moody lover, with logical thinking completely switched off, irrational decisions ruling her world and an intense fixation flourishing: I am a part of a chaste harem, a supply of crazed female attention he likes to disturb when he's bored. Being a fan, passive and observant, with no critical thought, is also a philosophical concept discussed in the novel.
Am I a fan of Sheena Patel's debut novel? Not a diehard, to be honest. The rawness and neuroticism of the monologue were sometimes too much, to say nothing of the narrator's naivety and emotional numbness which I found infuriating. Nevertheless, from now on Sheena Patel will be on my radar. I am very grateful to Vesna whose stellar review inspired me to read this book. I was happy to see I'm A Fan on the Republic of Consciousness Prize (which happens to be my favourite literary award) longlist announced today.
The Beatles' fans.
[Source]
July 22, 2022
A book about obsession, power relations, patriarchy, and social media. I guess it was good enough but I hated every single individual in it.
March 29, 2023
2.5🌟
Well here goes another hyped up book riding pretty much every prize list that I just didn't like.
A delusional protagonist of colour that is smitten to the point of obsession by a very successful, extremely misogynistic married man who is so obviously a player. He knows his white male privilege and uses it to full advantage. He barely gives her the time of day and tells her numerous times throughout the course of the book that he doesn't want to have a relationship with her and moves on to other women.
Our doormat of a heroine is nothing but persistent. Despite being in a fairly happy relationship she jeopardises not only that but all her self respect and dignity in persuing him relentlessly.
She also obsessively stalks the other woman's social media and gets to know her inside out through her posts.
The only enjoyable passages were where she divulges into some compelling discourse about social media, algorithms, racism, class, privilege. The white race using coloured people as tokens by having that brown friend or posting about that black person now and then just to tick a box and gain followers.
The other parts where she is just pining after the man and hounding him for just one meeting got a bit too crass and unbearable for me. It was like watching a train wreck on repeat.
After having just finished the superb novella, Foster by Claire Keegan where so much was put across by saying so little, I'm a Fan just came across as a big long ramble. Sorry, not for me!!
Well here goes another hyped up book riding pretty much every prize list that I just didn't like.
A delusional protagonist of colour that is smitten to the point of obsession by a very successful, extremely misogynistic married man who is so obviously a player. He knows his white male privilege and uses it to full advantage. He barely gives her the time of day and tells her numerous times throughout the course of the book that he doesn't want to have a relationship with her and moves on to other women.
Our doormat of a heroine is nothing but persistent. Despite being in a fairly happy relationship she jeopardises not only that but all her self respect and dignity in persuing him relentlessly.
She also obsessively stalks the other woman's social media and gets to know her inside out through her posts.
The only enjoyable passages were where she divulges into some compelling discourse about social media, algorithms, racism, class, privilege. The white race using coloured people as tokens by having that brown friend or posting about that black person now and then just to tick a box and gain followers.
The other parts where she is just pining after the man and hounding him for just one meeting got a bit too crass and unbearable for me. It was like watching a train wreck on repeat.
After having just finished the superb novella, Foster by Claire Keegan where so much was put across by saying so little, I'm a Fan just came across as a big long ramble. Sorry, not for me!!
August 20, 2023
I was a fan of I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel.
Our unnamed narrator is infatuated with the man she wants to be with who is sleeping with the woman she is obsessed with.
This novel is short with brief chapters and humorous titles like “The math ain’t mathing” and “When you miss your man that’s not your man but can’t trip cos he ain’t your man, but he is your man.” The timeline is not completely linear. It jumps around a bit.
It covers an array of themes but manages to integrate them well. It examines white feminism, white privilege, generational wealth, performative activism, and a lot more.
The woman who the narrator is obsessed with is the archetypal white feminist with all the accompanying privilege, including her exclusive lifestyle shared on social media, her luxury business, culturally appropriated decor and organic and locally sourced food.
I highly recommend this novel. I will definitely read whatever this author publishes next.
Thank you to Random House Canada for providing an arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
https://booksandwheels.com
Our unnamed narrator is infatuated with the man she wants to be with who is sleeping with the woman she is obsessed with.
This novel is short with brief chapters and humorous titles like “The math ain’t mathing” and “When you miss your man that’s not your man but can’t trip cos he ain’t your man, but he is your man.” The timeline is not completely linear. It jumps around a bit.
It covers an array of themes but manages to integrate them well. It examines white feminism, white privilege, generational wealth, performative activism, and a lot more.
The woman who the narrator is obsessed with is the archetypal white feminist with all the accompanying privilege, including her exclusive lifestyle shared on social media, her luxury business, culturally appropriated decor and organic and locally sourced food.
I highly recommend this novel. I will definitely read whatever this author publishes next.
Thank you to Random House Canada for providing an arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
https://booksandwheels.com
December 20, 2022
Raw, intense, uncompromising, what a debut! The narrator is a young (30-ish) British woman of nonwhite heritage caught in a love triangle with “the man I want to be with” and his other on-and-off girlfriend, “the woman I am obsessed with” (well, it’s a quadrangle, he is married). They are privileged, she is not. They are white, she is not. They have fans (he in the art industry, his other girlfriend as a savy influencer on Instagram), she doesn’t. So she becomes their fan-turned-stalker.
She is entangled in a cat-and-mouse relationship with him, no actual love on either side, but the game of domination between the sexes. She descends into an obsessive goal to own him, to control him, to reverse the arrow of dominance, but the pursuit of which just shows how much she lets that control her life.
At the same time, she follows his other girlfriend on Instagram, practically turning into a virtual stalker, trying to connect the dots of his and her life during the weeks and months when he avoids her, but also envying the other girlfriend's white privileged life of a famous poet’s daughter and a trend-setter of an expensive and “curated” lifestyle that brings her an army of Instagram followers and fans.
Their story is told in a nonlinear way through shorter vignettes that alternate between the narrator’s story and her thoughts (evidently, lending voice to the author) about the hypocrisies, illusions, and injustices of our contemporary society. Some vignettes read like short essays, most of which are quite powerful like “There’s no business like”, “buds“, “how does your garden grow”, and others.
Patel’s uncompromising and powerful views extend to the unequal class, racial, and gender issues of our times, as well as the optical illusions of social media which slowly penetrate into our lives.
It’s very quotable on all these issues (the lower the level of melanin in the body, the higher your place in the hierarchy …), so I’ll just sample a few about social media...
and its dehumanizing and illusory nature:
this automated time where an algorithm has to get to know you before a human being can […] You hear people you don’t know, in living rooms you’ll never be invited into, preparing meals you’ll never eat.
and its role in perpetuating the inequalities:
Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy?
and this scary aspect:
I’ve never followed anyone before and I’m surprised at how easy it is and how engrossed people are in their lives that they don’t notice someone tracking them.
My only caveats are about some repetitions that the author could have done without and the ending - still can’t make up my mind if it’s a literary ingenuity or a new writer’s struggle with how to go about it. These personal caveats aside, this is a terrific debut and an author to watch.
She is entangled in a cat-and-mouse relationship with him, no actual love on either side, but the game of domination between the sexes. She descends into an obsessive goal to own him, to control him, to reverse the arrow of dominance, but the pursuit of which just shows how much she lets that control her life.
At the same time, she follows his other girlfriend on Instagram, practically turning into a virtual stalker, trying to connect the dots of his and her life during the weeks and months when he avoids her, but also envying the other girlfriend's white privileged life of a famous poet’s daughter and a trend-setter of an expensive and “curated” lifestyle that brings her an army of Instagram followers and fans.
Their story is told in a nonlinear way through shorter vignettes that alternate between the narrator’s story and her thoughts (evidently, lending voice to the author) about the hypocrisies, illusions, and injustices of our contemporary society. Some vignettes read like short essays, most of which are quite powerful like “There’s no business like”, “buds“, “how does your garden grow”, and others.
Patel’s uncompromising and powerful views extend to the unequal class, racial, and gender issues of our times, as well as the optical illusions of social media which slowly penetrate into our lives.
It’s very quotable on all these issues (the lower the level of melanin in the body, the higher your place in the hierarchy …), so I’ll just sample a few about social media...
and its dehumanizing and illusory nature:
this automated time where an algorithm has to get to know you before a human being can […] You hear people you don’t know, in living rooms you’ll never be invited into, preparing meals you’ll never eat.
and its role in perpetuating the inequalities:
Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy?
and this scary aspect:
I’ve never followed anyone before and I’m surprised at how easy it is and how engrossed people are in their lives that they don’t notice someone tracking them.
My only caveats are about some repetitions that the author could have done without and the ending - still can’t make up my mind if it’s a literary ingenuity or a new writer’s struggle with how to go about it. These personal caveats aside, this is a terrific debut and an author to watch.
October 15, 2023
Too monotone for the kind of book that it was trying to be. It would have been more interesting if the protagonist was more critical about herself, because she is definetely the worst person in the novel.
September 11, 2023
I wanted to be a fan of this so badly but I just didn't like it! Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and well spoken of as the independently published book of the year, I had heard nothing but good things when I picked it up, and it failed to live up to the hype.
The book is told from the first person by an unnamed narrator and reads like a stream of consciousness parcelled into small chapters that are unchronological and jump around with no real order. The entire book is her speaking about 'the man I want to be with' (a man she is cheating on her boyfriend with who is also cheating on his wife with the narrator and many other women). For most of the book she complains over and over again about him, longs for him and pines for him despite his terrible behaviour. When not speaking about him, she is engaging in more repetitive descriptions of 'the woman i am obsessed with' which is the gateway to a narrative about class, privilege and whiteness that I found repetitive because it didn't expand on itself beyond the original ideas. I wish Patel had taken this book somewhere different rather than lingering on similar points throughout - the lack of structure ultimately let this one down.
The narrator spends this entire book going over the same things with no real progression of thought and idea, and there really wasn't enough material for 200 pages at all.
The book is told from the first person by an unnamed narrator and reads like a stream of consciousness parcelled into small chapters that are unchronological and jump around with no real order. The entire book is her speaking about 'the man I want to be with' (a man she is cheating on her boyfriend with who is also cheating on his wife with the narrator and many other women). For most of the book she complains over and over again about him, longs for him and pines for him despite his terrible behaviour. When not speaking about him, she is engaging in more repetitive descriptions of 'the woman i am obsessed with' which is the gateway to a narrative about class, privilege and whiteness that I found repetitive because it didn't expand on itself beyond the original ideas. I wish Patel had taken this book somewhere different rather than lingering on similar points throughout - the lack of structure ultimately let this one down.
The narrator spends this entire book going over the same things with no real progression of thought and idea, and there really wasn't enough material for 200 pages at all.
March 30, 2024
i need to stop taking book recommendations from tiktok…..
i don’t mean to continuously treat raven leilani’s luster as the master text in the lit fic subgenre of “unhinged woman unable to conceive of healthy sexual dynamics” (also known as ‘domestic dread’), but raven leilani’s luster IS the master text and books like this one demonstrate very clearly that not everyone can do it like the doer. in fact, not everyone can do it at all.
i’m a fan is a slim little book in the ‘affair’ subcategory of domestic dread that is almost totally told in the (conversational) interior (this is a mark against it in my book, as sheena patel’s prose and general stylistic execution is too dull to do anything to buoy the endless summarization happening) and verges on mind-numbingly didactic while simultaneously completely confused about its unnamed protagonist’s own system of morals/ethics. this cognitive dissonance provides little to no emotional relief, leads to no discernible arcs in emotional landscape or characters or even character dynamics, and in fact makes the narrator’s general, near-constant outlook of rage/resentment/sadness/envy/etc. unbearable to follow.
a cultural crit undercurrent flares up once or twice (i’m thinking mainly of the two instances where patel brings in real pieces of art/artists to critique, which felt completely out of place in the emotional terrorism of the toxic cheating that foregrounds the book), but mostly fizzles out in the face of the endless detritus of internet and object obsession.
books in the domestic dread niche work best when willing to experiment with style and execution, but also when stabilized by SOME MANNER of subtlety and/or subtext. this book has none. not a drop of subtext. everything is a shouted declaration, told to us three or four or even five times for emphasis, overexplained and/or underwritten, with no rhyme or reason to organizational structures like time/chronology.
a bore, a drag, overdoes what’s already been done to death, and provides no new or fresh material for the already oversaturated domestic dread niche.
(i’m unclear on how much of this book is fiction vs autofiction vs nonfiction, but because the paratext treats it and describes it as a novel, i’m reviewing it as such.)
i don’t mean to continuously treat raven leilani’s luster as the master text in the lit fic subgenre of “unhinged woman unable to conceive of healthy sexual dynamics” (also known as ‘domestic dread’), but raven leilani’s luster IS the master text and books like this one demonstrate very clearly that not everyone can do it like the doer. in fact, not everyone can do it at all.
i’m a fan is a slim little book in the ‘affair’ subcategory of domestic dread that is almost totally told in the (conversational) interior (this is a mark against it in my book, as sheena patel’s prose and general stylistic execution is too dull to do anything to buoy the endless summarization happening) and verges on mind-numbingly didactic while simultaneously completely confused about its unnamed protagonist’s own system of morals/ethics. this cognitive dissonance provides little to no emotional relief, leads to no discernible arcs in emotional landscape or characters or even character dynamics, and in fact makes the narrator’s general, near-constant outlook of rage/resentment/sadness/envy/etc. unbearable to follow.
a cultural crit undercurrent flares up once or twice (i’m thinking mainly of the two instances where patel brings in real pieces of art/artists to critique, which felt completely out of place in the emotional terrorism of the toxic cheating that foregrounds the book), but mostly fizzles out in the face of the endless detritus of internet and object obsession.
books in the domestic dread niche work best when willing to experiment with style and execution, but also when stabilized by SOME MANNER of subtlety and/or subtext. this book has none. not a drop of subtext. everything is a shouted declaration, told to us three or four or even five times for emphasis, overexplained and/or underwritten, with no rhyme or reason to organizational structures like time/chronology.
a bore, a drag, overdoes what’s already been done to death, and provides no new or fresh material for the already oversaturated domestic dread niche.
(i’m unclear on how much of this book is fiction vs autofiction vs nonfiction, but because the paratext treats it and describes it as a novel, i’m reviewing it as such.)
Currently reading
June 23, 2024⌞Pre-read:⌝
I'm here for the unhinged fmc
I'm here for the unhinged fmc
Read
March 7, 2024DNF @ 40% ugh
May 28, 2024
The stream-of-consciousness diatribe on the political and social implications of buying into a racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic system in an attempt to ‘transcend’ it in chapter 16 was by far the best part of this book, which was brought down significantly by the tedious, frustrating, repetitive, and distasteful plot of a terrible, volatile woman cheating on her boyfriend, whom she abuses physically and verbally, with a man who is cheating on many women, including his wife, and stalking the other women he is fucking, developing a very unhealthy obsession with them and their lives. It’s possible there’s an attempt at metaphor here, but I must admit I was so turned off by the character, her internal monologue, and the plot that I feel no urge to tease it out.
I’d love to read a collection of essays where Patel explores the social commentary here with more depth and breadth, but the fictional elements of this story were painful to get through. Luster by Raven Leilani attempts to portray a similar relationship dynamic fraught with power imbalance due to race, wealth, gender, and social status and is far more successful in a novel that is far more enjoyable to read.
Trigger/Content Warnings: stalking, infidelity, sexual assault, domestic abuse (physical, verbal, and emotional), racism, misogyny, xenophobia
Representation: *terrible* bisexual rep (MC coerces a woman into sexual acts she is uncomfortable with - a sexual assault), MC is a woman of colour
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I’d love to read a collection of essays where Patel explores the social commentary here with more depth and breadth, but the fictional elements of this story were painful to get through. Luster by Raven Leilani attempts to portray a similar relationship dynamic fraught with power imbalance due to race, wealth, gender, and social status and is far more successful in a novel that is far more enjoyable to read.
Trigger/Content Warnings: stalking, infidelity, sexual assault, domestic abuse (physical, verbal, and emotional), racism, misogyny, xenophobia
Representation: *terrible* bisexual rep (MC coerces a woman into sexual acts she is uncomfortable with - a sexual assault), MC is a woman of colour
You can find me on...
Youtube | Instagram | TikTok
You can join our book club over on Patreon...
PBB Book Club
May 24, 2024
3.5…. think the hype spoiled this for me a bit sighh
March 7, 2023
My main response to this book was weariness. I may be done with books about young women with messy lives making terrible decisions.
I found it impossible to be invested in the travails of the unlikeable narrator, or in her pursuit of a man who appears to have no redeeming qualities as a love interest other than his cock.
I've seen this book described as searing commentary on politics and social media. To that I would say that the narrator has all the political insight of a Sally Rooney protagonist - which I do not mean as a compliment - and I don't think the book has anything to say about social media that anyone who has been online over the last decade doesn't already know.
I got very little from this book, though others clearly have. It wasn't for me - but then it probably wasn't intended to be.
I found it impossible to be invested in the travails of the unlikeable narrator, or in her pursuit of a man who appears to have no redeeming qualities as a love interest other than his cock.
I've seen this book described as searing commentary on politics and social media. To that I would say that the narrator has all the political insight of a Sally Rooney protagonist - which I do not mean as a compliment - and I don't think the book has anything to say about social media that anyone who has been online over the last decade doesn't already know.
I got very little from this book, though others clearly have. It wasn't for me - but then it probably wasn't intended to be.
March 25, 2024
It started off promising…
However, I’m not, in actuality, a big fan of this book.
However, I’m not, in actuality, a big fan of this book.
March 30, 2023
This book is absolutely one that I needed to digest before compiling any sort of review together. I both liked and disliked this and this book almost feels like it is aimed to a specific type of readership and thus, would be hard to recommend.
Following a very unlikeable protagonist, we see her most unhinged, angry, mundane and complicated thoughts reflected through the fragmented writing style. This initially, I was incredibly drawn to and it started out as a fascinating story following somebody who is OBSESSED with cyberstalking a woman who her 'lover' is sleeping with. However for me, this quickly became quite repetitive and by the end I felt like there was no satisfying resolution nor discovery for her character (which perhaps was the point).
This was the epitome of vibes over plot, with no real linear timeline it caused for both a VERY QUICK reading experience but one that I will unfortunately quickly forget. I can absolutely see how many people love this and equally why people do not.
2.5 stars rounded up!
Following a very unlikeable protagonist, we see her most unhinged, angry, mundane and complicated thoughts reflected through the fragmented writing style. This initially, I was incredibly drawn to and it started out as a fascinating story following somebody who is OBSESSED with cyberstalking a woman who her 'lover' is sleeping with. However for me, this quickly became quite repetitive and by the end I felt like there was no satisfying resolution nor discovery for her character (which perhaps was the point).
This was the epitome of vibes over plot, with no real linear timeline it caused for both a VERY QUICK reading experience but one that I will unfortunately quickly forget. I can absolutely see how many people love this and equally why people do not.
2.5 stars rounded up!
August 25, 2023
Phew, what a tour de force!! 😮💨
Sheena Patel is a rising author of a second generation immigrants in the UK.
Sheena’s raw and unusual narrative of a non-chronological love affair of nameless stakeholders emphasising the criticism of patriarchal structures, latent racism, imbalanced feelings, obsession over social media is as powerful as it is an exhausting reading experience. That is, I felt the emotional drain of the first-person narrator in her life circumstances.
Given freedom and privileges living in a European country combined with a lack of belonging to a group or culture produced a distorted world to ‘her’, where she can’t find her place to obtain the high-ranking status in the society.
I was so happy to have empathised with ‘her’, whilst I was even happier that I could quickly get out of ‘her shoes’ with the last page of this novel.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Find me on instagram
Sheena Patel is a rising author of a second generation immigrants in the UK.
Sheena’s raw and unusual narrative of a non-chronological love affair of nameless stakeholders emphasising the criticism of patriarchal structures, latent racism, imbalanced feelings, obsession over social media is as powerful as it is an exhausting reading experience. That is, I felt the emotional drain of the first-person narrator in her life circumstances.
Given freedom and privileges living in a European country combined with a lack of belonging to a group or culture produced a distorted world to ‘her’, where she can’t find her place to obtain the high-ranking status in the society.
I was so happy to have empathised with ‘her’, whilst I was even happier that I could quickly get out of ‘her shoes’ with the last page of this novel.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Find me on instagram
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