I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

He looks at me like I’m a piece of meat and I like it.

Maybe the answer is not to buy less but of higher quality, maybe the answer is just not to buy things. The individualised, curated and careful consumerism they both espouse is like trying to solve the problem with more of the problem.

My people-pleasing, my co-dependency, my lack of boundaries, which on the surface looks so giving, nurturing and self-effacing is actually controlling, ego-driven and emotionally demanding.

How do you know how to elevate your life to art, something to be admired, envied, aspired to?

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?

left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families,

Thatll be me

If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.

I am hyper and fraught but I think I’m being normal and sexy.

that’ll also be me

I go to the toilet thinking he’ll be watching me as I walk away, completely enthralled by me. I glance back and he’s looking at his phone.

Every single person is implicated when a small voice is hurt by a person we pedestalled and totemised.

Women are beautiful, alluring but terrifying forces and the way to deal with terrifying forces is to break them.