A propulsive novel. A scorching novel. A novel with a powerful, turbocharged voice. A novel where Sheena Patel told an interviewer that she wanted to write “about shame and darkness and things you don't want to admit to yourself” - so much so, she “wanted the reader to feel sick.”
Sound appealing? Actually, this is a highly distinctive, well-written novel that's hard to put down. We have a unnamed narrator, a thirtysomething woman of color, a second-generation immigrant living in London, who zeros in on two individuals, a woman and a man - “the woman I am obsessed with” and “the man I want to be with.”
The woman is a Gwyneth Paltrow-type, wealthy, talented, beautiful, and, most notably, white. She has her own line of exceedingly expensive, high-end products, tens of thousands of online followers, and is the daughter of a famous American. The narrator obsessively follows her on the internet, sometimes refreshing her page fifteen times a minute.
The man, older and married, is a famous artist who has had and still maintains a relationship of sorts with the woman the narrator is obsessed with. Although the narrator lives with her boyfriend, she also desires a deeper relationship with the man she wants to be with.
Thus, we are provided with the framework. To delve into the more specific, often bitter and gnarly taste of the unfolding frenetic drama, I will connect my comments to several of Sheena Patel's chapter headings (in italics) and the narrator's actual words.
dick from someone who doesn't care if you live or die
“He says the sex is too intense between us which is why we don't do it anymore. He has a beautiful cock – straight and thick and very long. When he used to let me fuck him, he would be so deep inside me I could map the edges of my cervix, I had to ask him to go very slow as my eyes rolled back to moan.”
The narrator knows on some level the man she wants to be with is a superficial lout who uses women as objects to work out his own childish, selfish issues, but she continues to desire him so she can, among other reasons tied in with status, race and social inequality, spit her venom and express her rage.
“I ask him if he's heard from the woman I am obsessed with and he says no. I say, her book has come out, she's doing tons of interviews. He says, I know, someone I'm friends with in America sent me a link to one of them and it's cringe, I can't bear to look at it. I don't tell him how I've been monitoring her book release like I'm planning a drone strike.”
Shenna Patel intentionally made her narrator horrible, unappealing in the extreme. But, and this is a critical point, the author did not want to cast her protagonist as a victim or someone the reader would feel sorry for.
roll me one
“Our living room turns green and I spin forward in time and a voice says to me, you have to leave him. I do the maths very quickly. I turn thirty-one this year, and I'm on a slide to forty. If I do it when I'm thirty-five it'll be dangerous for me and if that's the case then why wait, it has to be now.”
The narrator can see quite clearly that women, unlike men, are on a biological clock, yet one more example of the emotional cruelty women must suffer in a patriarchal, male-dominated society.
i might look innocent but I screenshot a lot
“Sometimes I think about what I could do for revenge. Sometimes I think about posting a letter to his wife and in it I will write in black sharpie, he's fucked the woman I am obsessed with in your bed.”
In our media saturated world, there's little doubt how much our involvement and interface with computers, iPhones, apps, texts, email has become intertwined with our flesh and blood dealings with people. This is underscored when, later in the chapter, the narrator tells us, “The man I want to be with texts and he says he understands if I don't want to carry on with this after everything he has told me. I text back straightaway and say, I do.”
i'm proud ov you
“It takes me a long time to realize that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.”
Oh, such a realization! To recognize this man, this great artist, is using your skin color to define himself in others' perceptions and judgments. I did mention he's a superficial lout back there.
normalize saying, for a yt person, after complimenting yt people
“This is whiteness. It is everywhere, pervasive, its assumption that it needs to be there to sanitize, to give order by creating a hierarchy. Whiteness on its own is empty, it is forceful in its insistence of its peculiar quality of absence. It refuses to be described in and of itself and instead it needs some other thing to define itself against....Whiteness is nihilistic, it is the distilled form of the death drive and because it has a cold separation to life, it believes it alone is able to categorise, is the one to get rid of the excess, the one to do the accounts, to formulate the systems that regulate the chaos, to decide who lives and who dies – it alone can shoulder this responsibility it made up for itself, so anxiously adrift it is without purpose.”
The narrator frequently peppers her own existential struggles with scathing sociological/cultural/psychological observations. In this way, Sheena Patel has expanded what it means to write a traditional narrative.
I highly recommend I'm a Fan. There's also an audiobook available where Sheena Patel is the narrator.
Sheena Patel, writer and assistant director for film and TV, born and raised in London
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