Although it is an Instagram Novel – a no small part of the action consists of the protagonist obsessively spying on an influencer with whom she is obsessed through that network – I am a fan (Alpha Decay), the explosive debut of the British Sheena Patel, originated with what until recently we called a tweet. Donald Trump was saying goodbye to the White House and one of the followers of QAnon, the far-right conspiracy group that carried out the storming of the Capitol, was doing hermeneutics: he counted 17 United States flags on Trump's way to Air Force One. What letter occupies number 17 in the English alphabet? The Q. That was a sign. Trump was coming back.
Far from seeming crazy to her, or, well, in addition to seeming crazy to her, Patel thought that this is exactly the behavior that she and many of her friends have in romantic relationships, reading and rereading old WhatsApp messages of the object of their concern, trying to interpret signals. Like an obsessive Trumpist. How many (red) flags are there? Does he love me or doesn't he love me?
Patel, who works as an assistant director in the audiovisual sector and began writing short pieces within a collective she formed with four friends who call themselves 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE, generated a very powerful narrative voice, that of a 30-year-old girl from London, egotistical and a little manic, and with it she wrote this debut novel that became a word-of-mouth phenomenon when it was published in the United Kingdom last year. .
“The girls came and told me: 'It's me.' And I thought: 'How good. We are crazy together. It's amazing to write things for girls, it makes me happy. Although some men have also read it,” says Patel via video conference. Sexual politics play a tangential role in the book, and so do racial dynamics. And everything has its specific weight: men rule more than women, in heterosexual relationships. White people are about two laps ahead of racialized people at work and in life. The protagonist, a woman and brown, begins the game already losing, as can be sensed from the first sentence: “I spy on a woman who sleeps with the same man as me.”
The masculine vertex of this triangle, which is formed by a successful man in his fifties, an artist with some renown, is always referred to with an almost Homeric periphrasis, “the man I want to be with,” and the third point is not the wife. of this one, who has brief cameos, but another lover whom he combines with the protagonist, "the woman with whom I am obsessed." She is famous on Instagram, so much so that she has received a very juicy advance for writing a book that transfers to paper her delicate universe of good taste with traceability, the same one that permeates all the objects she sells in an online store called Terroir. “I liked that name because it reminds us of ‘terror’, in addition to conveying that pretentious idea that you can only come from a specific place”
What are your own Internet habits? “I hold back from Tik Tok because I know I would like it too much. We would all be lying if we said we didn't follow someone who tells us what our lives should be. And that's about access, class, and privilege. There are many people who monetize their lives like this by making it look easy. I wanted to talk about how networks can hide inequality. An influencer is essentially telling you: I do this, you can do it too. Can? Of course not! They wouldn't treat me the same. People in their 20s and 30s think they are not replicating what their parents and grandparents did, but in reality they are. The networks have democratized celebrity but they carry inequality intrinsically.”
Placing the novel in the art world was useful for him to fulfill one of his objectives, “to bother liberal circles.” “In addition,” she adds, “I am obsessed with books about the women who orbited around the great artists: Picasso, Lucian Freud, Basquiat. I have read Françoise Gilot's memoirs a million times. She is her own master, she has a lot to say in that story and it is reductionist to say that she had no power. In addition, there are also several women fighting with their feminine tricks to see who is closest to Picasso.” That is another rule of contemporary civility that is broken in Soy fan, which dynamites the resacralized idea of female friendship. “We are told to value friends more than romantic relationships, we are told: 'put your friends first', but something has been marketed that is not always true. [Heterosexual] women sometimes fight over men, they are jealous and crueler to other women than to men and I wanted to reflect that honestly. It's horrible but it happens."
One of the most brutal ways that the protagonist has to express this lack of sisterhood is to think about the competitive advantage she offers to the man she wants to be with: her fresh eggs, something that neither the wife nor the first lover have, in in case the man wants to reproduce, because they have already passed their peak fertility.
Patel set out to create an unpleasant female voice, like those that abound in contemporary fiction, but with a crucial difference. “It was a political decision to make her like that, because she is not white. And there are plenty of stories of white female protagonists being unlikable, but in the British publishing space I wasn't finding this. He only found nostalgic stories, in which migrant characters long for their country of origin or have just arrived. I know those narratives but I don't reflect on them. Nostalgia irritates me and I didn't want to tell the story of a victim. Yes, the man treats her badly, but she is brutal with the people around her. "She can't be pitied, she didn't want anyone to feel sorry for her but rather afraid." Patel wanted, and achieved, that I Am a Fan be read with one hand covering her eyes, as she has read authors like Kathy Acker. “Her Algeria begins with the phrase: 'I'm fucking you'. You read it and think: me?? I love that use of the present.” Another key influence was the prose of Hanif Kureishi, especially Intimacy, which Patel read as a teenager.”
When writing that book, a thinly disguised and unsweetened portrait of his divorce, Kureishi found himself in the position of choosing between devastating phrases and the possibility of hurting his family. They won the phrases. Has it happened to Patel yet? “I recently wrote something that could potentially be brutal, but it serves the story. I thought: I'm sorry, he's staying. It's scary to say it, but it's good to say it, and give people permission to be a dick." What she is having a hard time is separating herself from that voice, the one that emerged for Soy fan because being a little bad is addictive. "I miss her. “It was great to have the freedom to speak like that.”
