This substack has nothing to do with my book. “Well, finally!!” some of you will be thinking. And I understand that. To be honest having a book out does make you feel like you are going mad a little bit. I’m definitely not an introvert but it’s like having a load of birthday parties all back to back. It’s not my (or possibly anyone’s) natural disposition.
I have been really happy with the response so far, from critics but also from people who don’t work as book critics but often have such a smart read of the book and get my style so well. This tweet about the sentence structure I developed for Lazy City made me really happy, as have a lot of messages. A lot of my project (in non fiction too) is about assuming people will get things without me over explaining or caveating what I’m doing and I love when that works out. So thank you.
But anyway the substack is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. A little while ago I was talking to a girl at a party and she told me her job was to manage the social media strategy for a luxury estate agent. Part of her remit included sitting behind the instagram page of the estate agent, posting photos of the nice houses it is selling with aspirational captions on its behalf, and fielding the engagement they receive and so on.
I said that sounded fun. I’m interested in the idea of curating a brand you don’t have to be publicly associated with. I think because branding is part of my (and all other writers) work, even those of us who have no interest in being influencers or pundits or whatever, but in our case the brand is inherently tied to us as people which can feel a little strange.
I’ve always been mindful of the unpleasant elements of this. I tried to be careful about how much “me” as a person was tied to my work from the start. I didn’t have byline photos anywhere for a while because I didn’t want people to associate my writing with the fact I am a young woman because I know that (sadly) this will always do you a disservice in terms of how seriously you are taken. That’s really the main branding issue as a woman, to me, actually: constantly being threatened with this unserious rendering.
But when I didn’t have my image as part of my work people would talk about me on social media and say I was ugly. They had no idea what I looked like, it wasn’t based on anything. I guess they just assumed that if I wasn’t foregrounding my appearance it must have been because I was disfigured in some way. So I figured there was no escape and started having photos.
I learned a lesson from that though, in terms of the assumptions people can make about why you might choose to highlight or suppress certain information about yourself. And that has been useful at least. Privacy always comes at the expense of misapprehensions, so you basically have to weigh that up in terms of what you choose to reveal about yourself.
Anyway, back to the luxury estate agent. I was curious about how it would feel to manage the image of something which had no connection to your sense of self. (Or so I imagined anyway.) I had the sense it would be liberating and, as I said, fun. She shook her head frantically and told me no.
“People can get very angry at the account,” she told me. “It’s very stressful.” She told me that people would regularly post comments on the photos the account posted of nice houses, calling the account a bitch and a cunt and so on. I have to admit I burst out laughing.
I found it so surreal. The idea of someone on their phone, or logging on to the computer to reply “cunt” to a picture of a swish townhouse seems so totally cracked to me that I can’t imagine not finding it funny. Maybe that’s just me. But try to put yourself in the headspace of someone who would do this. It is hard to imagine, isn’t it? It seems quite surreal that this is happening in the world, doesn’t it?
I always find it interesting that the internet seems to facilitate and channel such unmediated aggression. I don’t know why that is. Maybe the feeling of being removed from your body sets people free to behave as they wish they could in their day to day life. But I hope it’s not that, that would say something bleak about human nature.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s because it feels like the target isn’t real. In this case, for example, it doesn’t feel like a person, it feels like a luxury house. But that still leaves the question of what you would get out of swearing at the luxury house. How would it feel? Soothing? Transgressive?
She didn’t find it funny. And actually she didn’t seem as detached from it as I imagine I would be if I was the Wizard of Oz figure, sitting behind the account. One mistake I think she’d made was trying to rationalise it, instead of considering it bizarre. “Well, if people are angry, we have to listen,” she said at one point. And maybe this says something about how being a brand yourself warps your brain a little, but I have to admit I started laughing again.
Till next time xxxxx
Recent stuff from me (ok some book):
An excerpt of my book!!!! in Hazlitt, which published one of my favourite ever pieces too.
I wrote for Elle about fake tan and dressing inappropriately (dream commission).
And then I will be in Devon near the end of September at the Budleigh Salterton literary festival which I’m very excited about. Please come if you are in town.
Weekly flowers: