Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

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.

I’ve been on these Interwebs a long, long time. I had a blog in the aughts, I joined Twitter in ‘09, I’ve seen the rise of Facebook and Instagram, and the fall of MySpace. God help me, I’m even on TikTok. Through it all, every time anyone woud advise me, or tell me what readers want from authors, the answer was always ‘authenticity.’ They want to peek behind the curtain, they want to see what your life is really like! Except I don’t think that’s actually what anyone wants. What people want is a version of the truth, but not the whole messy, complicated reality. We want to see how that movie star decorates her kitchen but we don’t want to see her dirty dishes or the dog hair dust bunnies on the floor; we want to hear the story of how the famous singer met her husband, but we don’t want to watch them argue for twenty minutes about why he can’t ever hang up his wet towels, or why she keeps inviting her mother on their vacations when he can’t stand her mother. We want to see enough of the truth that we feel we’ve learned something but not so much that our illusions are shattered. It’s confusing! When you add in the idea of ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ -- the way that, even if you don’t feel happy or confident, you need to appear that way, for your own sanity, and to keep your followers happy -- it gets even more confusing. Finding that sweet spot, that “right amount of real,” as Daphne puts it, is a challenge for any woman. For a young woman, just starting her life online, it’s a giant challenge. It’s interesting to consider how much, or how little, Daphne succeeds.