In last month’s Constant Reader Tell
Me Everything That Happened I showed how Chelsea Sedoti focused a mystery
around a missing teenager who had one goal in life: to be an influencer and was
willing to do anything possible to achieve that goal.
Having just finished You Will
Never Be Me Jesse Q. Sutanto’s dark, satiric thriller I can now say with
total confidence that Maylee Hayes, had she survived Sedoti’s book, would have
fit in perfectly with the world we see set entirely in the world of
influencers. The two protagonists – Meredith Lee and Aspen Palmer - despite being significantly older and
parents are shallow, emotionally vacant and uncaring of the feelings of their
families in relation to the followers that they have on Instagram and TikTok.
It’s a narrow contest by the time the novel is which one of them is truly the
worst person possible even though on has killed the other. The novel goes from
one point of view to the other for the first half though until one ends up dead
but even after we see the aftermath we basically see exactly why the two of
them were friends for so long. They had no regard for feelings or anyone around
them, cared more about being in the industry than anything else and had no
ability to function outside their sphere of social media.
The novel starts with Meredith
whose first sentence is “I’m stalking my best friend.” Much of Meredith’s story
involves flashbacks to when she and Aspen first met. Meredith, like Aspen (and
Sutanto herself) is Asian. The one point we feel something resembling sympathy for
either woman is when Meredith makes it clear about the struggle of being ‘the
right kind of Asian’ and even that dissipated by one sentence in:
“I was born and raised in Ohio
and I had to learn a long time ago how to fit in – which parts of my Asian-ness
to highlight and which to hide. One of the things I quickly learned to do was
to dissociate from other Asians who weren’t conforming. It might sound cruel,
but know what else is cruel? High school kids in Ohio.”
The first time Meredith meets the
woman who will become known as ‘All-Day Aspen she makes it sound like she’s
being generous:
“(Aspen) clearly looks like an
Asian person from Asia, and not even the right parts of Asia…For me to approach
this plump – okay. She’s not plump but her collarbones aren’t jutting out the
way that LA likes them to – this non skinny Asian woman is a huge risk for me
to take.”
Meredith is slightly more
experienced that Aspen at the time, and Meredith clearly sees a chance to mold
and shape Aspen to the model that will make her marketable.
The trouble is eventually the
student surpassed the teacher and Meredith has never truly forgiven Aspen for
that. Aspen realized the importance of TikTok before she did and it’s clear
that Aspen has got a better handle on the world of social media then her friend
does. The real wedge began when they went to a party together in Malibu and Meredith
ran into a man named Ben Palmer. Meredith never truly forgave Aspen for falling
in love with him and abandoning her and – worse – starting to blow up on social
media when she chose to become a ‘mom-fluencer’.
By the time we talk to Aspen she
and Ben have been married for seven years and the bloom is entirely off the
rose. Aspen has three children, including one who has diabetes. She says over
and over that she will live and die for her kids. It’s clear from the start
that’s as fake as everything else about her. Perhaps the greatest joke about Never
Be Me is that not only do all of the people in Aspen’s field totally
believe everything on her feed is real, but even Meredith herself is astonished
when she opens her social media account and finds out – gasp! – she’s been
faking everything for the cameras.
I’m honestly not sure which part
of Sutanto’s narrative is more frightening: that millions of people follow All Day
Aspen with the kind of certainty that everything she does is real or that even
people in the industry don’t seem to realize it themselves. You would think by
this point in the history of social media the majority of the world would have
realized that at the very least, everything that seems spontaneous and real on
the Internet is as fake and rehearsed as everything in reality shows. But
apparently millions of people are gullible enough to spend their lives trying
to not only follow women like Aspen but actually think their failures are
because they haven’t done things right.
Early in the novel Meredith
steals Aspen’s social media feed and eventually learns everything that Aspen
has been doing has been rehearsed and redone a hundred times and that she is
not the model mom that she’s been pretending to be. Meredith knows how much we
fake for the ‘gram but it’s still stunning to her as to ‘how much one could
fake it for the camera’. Listening to Meredith we eventually realize how much
the two have in common: neither can believe the world of social media isn’t what
it appears in the real world. In Meredith’s case, she is stunned to realize
everything Aspen does is “productions that she’s composed beforehand and then
taken time out of her real life to act out and edit.” In Aspen’s case, all that
matters to her is what is shown on social media to the point that her husband
has come to loathe her and her young children have come to hate every time they
go on social media to appear in one of her posts.
Meredith, it’s worth noting, has
already taken this to an extreme. When Aspen became a mother and her followers
blew up she decided to get pregnant herself. She makes it clear it’s her
deepest and darkest secret. When she was getting too old to be part of the
fashion and beauty genre of social media she decided to get pregnant herself
for the dual purpose of social media and in order to hang out more with Aspen,
who’s life as a mother and influencer just left her no time to hang out. It is
telling that she makes it clear the best moment of her life was not giving birth
but when she gets a million followers. She is not a good mother and spent most
of her time when she’s not putting her infant son in social media off on her
sister Clara, who doesn’t care about the industry and hates being a babysitter.
That Meredith cares more about her friendship with Aspen then with her sister
shows her own narcissism.
But it is called and raised by
Aspen over and over who makes it clear repeatedly that it is more important she
appear to have a perfect family on social media then to actually have
one. Ben has stopped sleeping with Aspen long ago and we will eventually learn
he’s had multiple affairs, some of which happen over the course of the novel. Aspen
doesn’t seem to mind that fact as much
as she does as that Ben doesn’t appreciate what she does for a living: no
matter how many times Ben tries to persuade her to care about the real world
instead of making videos, a wall of incredulity goes up that Aspen genuinely
comprehend. As for her children she says she loves them and that she is doing what she has to make a
living to provide for them (one of her daughters has diabetes and insurance
doesn’t cover it) but you can never escape the fact that she always seems
unhappy with them and always seem to consider them more props for her accounts
than actual human beings.
There are black holes in both
Meredith and Aspen where their humanity should be and in their place are the
counters on social media. Meredith spends much of her section of the novel
trying to destroy Aspen’s social presence while also desperately wanting her
best friend back and can not see the connection between the two. Aspen claims
over and over to be a loving family woman but she ignores the needs of her husband
and doesn’t seem to care about the collateral damage that she causes by what
she does. During the novel we learn that her tech support Liv was at one point
a follower of her work and her marriage fell apart because she tried to do it.
When she came to work for Aspen and learned how fake everything was she felt
little remorse in trying to devastate her life. Aspen, it’s worth noting, has
had Liv working for her for several months before she invites her into her
house and lets her in. Confronted with the falseness of what she does, she seems
far more ashamed and upset when her lies are exposed on social media then she
does with Liv’s actual exposure of her.
Indeed the only time Aspen really
seems to feel anything genuine is when her lies are exposed on social media.
This is telling because we see firsthand the damage she does to all those close
to her who suffer due to her actions and the comments by trolls online seem to
bother her far more. She always seems the most upset when appointments that she
uses for sponsorship are cancelled because of her online behavior. At some point
she seems to really believe the falsified world of ‘Aspen All Day’ is the one
she has to live in. Ironically near the end of the novel she finally decides to
show authentic emotion and what she actually does preparing food and cleaning
houses in her videos. She’s stunned when that gives a positive response – but it
also shows that she’s so focused on image she never has considered reality
might be what people want.
What none of this can describe is
how frequently hysterical this novel can be. In the hands of another
writer both Meredith and Aspen could come across as the Asian female equivalent
of Tom Ripley for the Instagram age. But both of them are so used to living in
the world of rehearsed and fake media that the ability to improvise or behave
realistically is just something that they can pull off. Both of them are
complete sociopaths, of course (and one is a complete an utter psychopath) but there
also horribly bad at covering up their crimes. The subtext is that they’ve
spent so much time in front of a camera (or a phone) pretending to be people
that they’ve forgotten what basic human interaction is like. This is bad when
your lies are being uncovered in a
social context; when you’re being investigated for murder and you can’t figure
out what the detectives are trying to figure out it just leads to you looking
like the bad actress you are.
Like Tom Ripley one of them
commits murder and gets away Scot free with their crimes. In You Will Never
Know Me there’s clearly evidence of planning and premeditation (on social media,
of course) and is that same social media that allows the killer to get away with
the crime, brag to the person she’s framed for doing it and walk away with ‘a
smile worthy of Instagram’. What’s all the more frightening is that in the
world we live in we can see the killer simply moving into a new line of work, giving
interviews on podcasts, being part of the true crime narrative and being
willing to give new posts on how her family is ‘surviving after this horrible
trauma’. I don’t know if Sutanto plans a sequel for this novel (she’s pretty
busy in both adult and YA fiction) but you could see a ready made sequel, if
not a series where a true crime podcast starts to investigate the death among the
mom-fluencers, goes to the conspiracy sites where things are not as it seems
and the whole revelation is livestreamed on TikTok. I still don’t want to go
anywhere near the world of Meredith and Aspen but I’d gladly read far more
about in that archaic art-form known as print media.
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