Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

It’s almost religious, that belief, that faith that a piece of silk or denim or cotton jersey could disguise your flaws and amplify your assets and make you both invisible and seen, just another normal woman in the world; a woman who deserves to get what she wants.

“You have an authenticity that people like. You’re just…” She tilted her head again. “Unapologetically yourself. People feel like you’re their friend,”

The trick of the Internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real… which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all. The more followers I got, the more I thought about that contradiction; the more my followers praised me for being fearless and authentic, the less fearless and authentic I believed myself to be in real life.

shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’?” I wanted her to leave; to get out of this house, to stop calling, stop texting, stop writing, stop trying. I wanted

“When you have excluded the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth,”