Green eyes for a ‘green fairyland’: I’m A Fan, by Sheena Patel
No spoilers
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You won’t be surprised to hear that Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan is a tale of obsession.
The unnamed narrator – you couldn’t really call her a protagonist, as she’s not even the main character of her own story – is both fanatical and fantasist. Her every waking moment is dominated by thoughts of two people: The Man She Wants To Be With and The Woman She Is Obsessed With.
The Man is sleeping with both the narrator and The Woman – although neither are his wife of twenty years, and the three are just a small representation of his vast sexual roster.
The narrator exists for the infrequent moments he chooses to shine the light of his attention and desire upon her, utterly possessed with longing for this man to pick her above all the others. With the benefit of our removed perspective, we the audience can see The Man as he truly is – nothing but a narcissist and an emotional abuser, repeatedly diabolical to the women in his life – but the narrator yearns after him all the same1.
The other object of the narrator’s desire is The Woman She Is Obsessed With. The Woman is white and blonde and skinny. You know the type because she’s probably always popping up on your Instagram FYP – yoga body, fine bone structure complimented by delicate jewellery, the kind of wealthy to wear her privilege in the quality of her hair and nails and skin. As a social media influencer, she’ll talk about self-care and finding balance and not feeling pressured to ‘do it all’ but ultimately she’s always lived off daddy’s money so how hard can things really have been for her. A digital arbiter of domestic taste, The Woman doesn’t “consume”, despite always having new and beautiful things. Rather, she curates, or maybe cultivates, her surroundings – art, ornaments, furnishings, textiles. Money gives her the luxury of quality, but more importantly, the luxury of time to do and enjoy these things.
The narrator longs for this woman’s privilege, her status2, her preferential access to The Man – but this desire is warped by the narrator’s absolute undisguised disgust for everything The Woman stands for. There are some killer chapters (and all are shots, no chasers) slicing through the hypocrisy of Women Like The Woman She Is Obsessed With and the privilege they enjoy seemingly with no self-awareness.
The Woman, who lives in America, is not native to the land off of which she culturally capitalises. When The Woman decides she’s going to open an artsy boutique cafe with the extensive backing of her rich father’s rich friends, we feel the unspoken revulsion of the narrator as she watches via social media while ‘a white woman borne of a white man in a country baked in the violence of European colonialism’ stakes ‘poles marking the plot of the cafe into the desert ground’.
Some of my favourite writing in I’m A Fan relates to food, which as a theme serves to highlight the gulf of class difference between women in the story. The Woman is a child of a ‘green fairyland’ created by her food pioneer father, a history which ‘bestows a Demeter quality upon’ her – and her online brand. For The Woman, cooking is a creative practice because, again, she has the money and time to buy organic produce beautiful enough to be displayed as a form of still life installation. This is all aspirational content for her Insta followers, who thank her for sharing her wisdom and beauty with them. Juxtaposed to this, the narrator, after a long shitty day at work, desires ‘the stability of mass-produced food’: ‘what if I don’t want something wholesome, what if I want something tasty and bad for me, a treat to allay all this drudgery, something now, quick, fatty and delicious.’
These incisive reflections on class and creative opportunity are moments of absolute brutal clarity in between the narrator’s disconnected, manic thought spirals. One literally stopped me in my tracks as I listened to the audiobook on an early supermarket shift. I do this every morning before the sun comes up, when I go to my second, “real”, 9-5 office job, where I don’t really talk about having a second job because I worry that it makes me look unprofessional to have to work two. Packing cereal boxes and bags of pears at a rate of 3.5 items every 60 seconds, I’m wondering, like the narrator does, what it must be like to be able to list ‘head creative, innovator, artist, nutritionist, designer’ on an Insta bio, like The Woman does, as if even one of those jobs wouldn’t take up the vast majority of a working week. I know then that it will be several weeks before I have time to write any of my own thoughts about this down, because my work days, with only two jobs, are 15 hours long. The Woman, the narrator reports, ‘says she has five jobs but when my dad had to work a second job at KFC to pay the mortgage, he didn’t tell us or anyone because there was no pride in having two jobs so why can she say she has five, unless she has none’. I guess for rich people with limitless free time, redefining a bunch of hobbies/interest signifiers as a collection of “jobs” makes them feel like they’re earning their unimaginable privilege? I don’t know. Rich people, let me know your thoughts on this.
I’m A Fan is palpably livid with the narrator’s anger. She may be losing her mind, but who among us could argue with her observation that ‘these wealthy aesthetes [are] the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendents of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures that decimate the cultures those objects are from’.
We might be nodding along like she’s right and she should say it, but, I must warn you: the reader shouldn’t expect to get any holier-than-thou sense of satisfaction from I’m A Fan.
Much of the story follows the narrator’s obsessive trailing through Instagram, which is where she stalks The Woman, and the structure of the book replicates the narrator’s compulsive refreshing of her feed.
Each short, acidic chapter is launched rapid-fire by the narrator as she unloads confession after confession. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness, with each dispatch disconnected from the last – sometimes a rant, sometimes a diary entry, sometimes a tangent. Consuming this book feels like reaching across the bar for the next in a long, ill-advised row of cheap sour shots. It’s like the sick delight you get from listening to a series of voicenotes detailing the exact fuckedupedness of someone else’s drama. This is a jaw-droppingly addictive method of storytelling, and it mirrors the short Insta reel clips designed to monopolise our attention. It reminds us that we, like the narrator, are willing to lose hours of our lives to Meta’s attention economy every time we open the app. Let she who can resist the siren’s call of other people’s messy business be the first to delete her account.
And despite the level of critical awareness she demonstrates through her analysis of class and culture, the narrator still can’t help but covet The Woman’s life – or more specifically, her carefully considered presentation of life.
Like the narrator’s lusting after a lifestyle she knows is based on wealth disparity and a history of colonial violence, social media depends on our own longing for the shiny illusions of lives lived by the people in our phones. Even if we understand that fantastical constructions of the self are the norm on social media. Even if we know that immense privilege and wealth are required to live that easily. Even if we still feel the same sense of disgust the narrator feels towards characters like The Woman She Is Obsessed With as she verbally skewers the conditions that allow a person like that to exist.
The novel makes clear that although we as the readers might agree with her conclusions, we also share her hypocrisy. I’m A Fan is a black mirror, and when we look at the narrator and her messy, fucked-up life with voyeuristic pleasure, we see ourselves staring straight back.
- Reading I’m A Fan for the first time, I found myself confused by the sheer number of women falling for The Man’s abject nonsense – but managed to humble myself by remembering all the things I’ve done for women who never really wanted me back. We’re all guilty of falling for our own delusional fantasies of what a person could be – I Saw the Red Flags I Just Thought It Was A Circus etc etc. ↩︎
- À la Ingrid Goes West, maybe? ↩︎
Emily Jessica Turner 