‘Aesthetica’ chronicles an influencer’s not-so-Cinderella story in a fairy tale for the Instagram age. Author AllieRowbottom speaks with Delia_Cai about how she crafted the tale—and the real-life Instagrammer who inspired it.
There’s a tendency in the internet age to meet every cycle of new technology with the usual anxieties thatmight finally be the thing that changes everything about us—how we live, what we want, and who we hope to be.
But maybe Instagram has already done all that? The app has given rise to an influencer economy too formidable to dismiss with a straight face and is old enough now, at a decade, to have inspired at least one great novel: the forthcomingThe book, due out November 22 from Soho Press, fashions the life of one IG-famous hopeful into a study of our eternal anxieties about youth and desire and self-commodification versus self-empowerment, all against a background of reply-guys comments,...
Rowbottom’s protagonist in the book—which is set in both 2017 Instagram and the slightly future-fied Los Angeles—is the 19-year-old @annawrey, who plots her ambitions for clout while also managing her mother’s disapproval and declining health. The story flits between Anna’s teenage entrance to the LA influencer scene and her 35-year-old self’s recollections as she’s preparing herself to undergo the ultimate plastic surgery procedure that promises to return Anna to her true self.
When I caught up with Rowbottom ahead of the novel’s publication, the 36-year-old author, who also wrote the critically acclaimed 2018 memoirwas fretting slightly. She was working to pull together a launch party that would include Botox injections, a reading fromabout building outas a modern fairy tale—not to mention the real-life Instagrammer who originally inspired her novel.
Yeah, I wanted to find a way to write about that experience of being young in New York, and feeling like the city is your oyster, where people are stopping you on the street and being like, “Are you a model?” Total scams when I think of it now, just getting stopped by men who said they were “photographers.” I knew in my memory that that experience was troubling in some ways, and I wanted to get into the nuance of it.was in production.
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