Like Me Quotes

“That’s the thing about money. It insulates you from certain truths. If ignorance is bliss, then it’s also the greatest luxury money can buy.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“This was the language afforded to us women, speaking in brand names and I love it and Where’d you get this? All of it a white noise disguising the emptiness and rage that yawned just beneath the surface.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“It was the kind of thing brands had started posting recently, as if they were moral entities instead of capitalist enterprises, as if they had values beyond customer retention and profit margin. We’d come to expect this from them—they were now our legislators, our educators, and, most importantly, our friends. As people began to think of themselves more and more as brands, brands started to feel more and more like people.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“But if I were to become unlikeable, if I were no longer viable as a brand, I might finally allow myself to be a person. This book is my final act of defiance, my last hope, and I’ve done the one thing that nobody, not my mother and not even me, expected: I’ve written the truth. Not anything so neat and tidy as what you read in the news, or see on TV. But it is the truth, as I experienced it that summer. I’ve no illusions about being liked after this. But at least I’ll be understood.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“We are all of us trapped inside a hall of mirrors, our shiny, hard exteriors reflecting both to each other and on each other, ad infinitum, forever and ever so we can’t escape.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“Books made good content. Yoga, meditating, brunch, smoothies, colorful cocktails, walks in the park: these were all good content, and good content was all I thought about those days. It was my god.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“When the vitriol started rolling in, I really got excited. Everyone knows you’re not anyone on the Internet until someone has threatened to rape or kill you,”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“One comment read, in all-cap letters: I WANT TO BE HER. I screenshotted it immediately, my brain humming with pleasure. I thought: Me too. I want to be her, too.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“For all that talk about selling one’s soul, no one seems to be in the market. It’s the body that everybody wants. The body is a currency everyone can understand.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“I realized then that everybody was pretending, all the time, but that for most people, for the people we call “normal,” the pretending part eventually falls away and the act simply becomes their life.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“It all felt so impersonal, even though it was about me. That’s how fame works—it’s like love without the personal connection. Since fame means having a bunch of people love you without ever knowing you, being known is therefore antithetical to it. You are only adored where you are absent, in a permanent form of dissociation, like what I used to do at casting calls—becoming a body only, becoming a shell.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“Who cared about going online if you didn’t even have a presence? If no one even Liked anything you did?”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“The interview was shared around, people loved it and acted like I was saying something new and profound instead of the same meaningless garbage everyone else was saying. That was what content was; it encapsulated any form of expression, all art, journalism, social media, and it didn’t matter what it was saying, or if there was any message; the message was the content; the content was the content. As if all of it were just the contents of something, the guts of some juggernauting beast.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“The set had been styled to look like a quaint New York City apartment, some cool girl’s bedroom. I actually thought it looked familiar. Or maybe it was just that everything had started to look the same, an algorithmically optimized aesthetic that lacked any border or definition so you could move through spaces as frictionlessly as you could scroll through Instagram,”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“They complain about it, but secretly they love it. Sometimes, I deliberately upload videos that make me seem unbalanced—ones in which I dance a little offbeat, or sing a song I made up.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“Since we can’t one hundred percent prove it was rape, it’s best we don’t bring it up,” he’d explained. “It was consensual the one time, but the other—I mean, I had bruises.” “That’s too confusing for the jury to understand. Juries’ minds are binary—either you consented to sex or you didn’t, it can’t be both at different times.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“Outside the courtroom were a dozen or so protestors holding signs, many of which said Free Mickey on pink bristol board. My favorite read Guilty of Fucking the Patriarchy, Innocent of Everything Else.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“but, though the Internet is endless, our memory and attention spans are embarrassingly finite.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“A strange thing happened during those weeks: I hardly thought about the Internet, or cared if people were thinking of me. It might have been the antidepressants they’d put me on. Or it could have been that I was reading again (I’d started Anna Karenina and couldn’t put it down). Then again, I suspect it was largely because I’d given up.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“He assured me it was fine, and I was left with the shame of having apologized to a man, this man, for not arbitrarily having my period at that moment.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“it was getting more and more difficult to decipher the line between what was happening in my head and what wasn’t.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“It wasn’t a conscious decision to copy her at first. Her posts had penetrated my brain so deeply, it was not always readily apparent where they ended and my own creativity began.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“She laughs, feeling self-conscious. Because despite the empty room, Gemma is not alone. The raspberries were not a gift, but a bribe. In exchange, Gemma will parcel out the moments of her life to her hundreds of thousands of Followers, to whoever is watching. She will give everything, until she is unsure what is content and what is her life. She is never alone anymore. Not even tonight, on the deck, is she really alone. She knows that through the clouds the moon is watching. Everyone is watching.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“In any case, the fact remains: people see many things in my face, but what they never seem to see is me.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“It’s a figment, Michaela,” he said, putting the fork down. “It’s just another gymnasium for the masses to exercise in, so they don’t become disgruntled and rebel against their overlords. It gives the appearance of power, but don’t be fooled, daughter of mine, there is no power there.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me

“I did not, however, account for the pernicious ways in which a person’s influence can embed itself within you, changing you from the inside out. I had imagined that my actions, so easily faked, would not impact who I was; yet added together, it turned out those actions amounted to my life.”
― Hayley Phelan, Like Me