I'm a Fan will leave you reeling
Much, much, much to unpack in this confessional, messy, roundabout
Hey folks,
This week I read Sheena Patel’s debut novel, ‘I’m a Fan’, where “a single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another”.
I found myself hating and rooting for the narrator in the same breath. Her grasping, reaching, hunger for power and access lands more on the doorstep of structural violence thwarting ugly things out of her, than her own thwarting autonomy. And yet, we see her screw up the loving relationships she has in her life with such reckless abandon, that you cannot help but question the level of her own autonomy, how much her actions are a decisive fuck you to a system that she knows will never accept her. The narrator knows the poison she is chasing (an abusive, emotionally unavailable, rich white man, his lover and the nepotistic world that swarms around them), and she veers from self-hatred to indifference to active celebration of her own self-destruction. What she hates is not so much just ‘the system’, but that she can’t win the man and life she wants within it. That maybe she’d throw the anticapitalist sentiment under the carpet if she could be welcomed into the hall of fame. And don’t we all, to some degree, toy with that idea.
There is something deeply disturbing in a ‘deranged’ woman refusing to comply to such an extent that she will dance on the burning deck of her life, or rather, willingly jump through its crumbling structure, knowing that the floor was already rotten and there will be no soft landing. Even the narrator’s characterisation as mad cannot help but be gendered and racialised, bitingly referencing the Bertha Masons of past and present when she comes across *unstable* to say the least. As she obsessively spins round and round, fulfilling the worst imagination of the man she wants, we ultimately find a character desperately searching for a sense of belonging in others over herself. Lost in that searching as we are lost in her voice.
It would be fair to say that nothing is beyond reproach in this novel: it’s a seething critique and mocking of whiteness and wealth, the hypocrisy and irony of neocolonial culture and taste, the crystal clear double standards and fetishisation of women of colour, the pathetic neediness demanded of misogynists who claim women are too needy, the gatekeeping of language and furniture and fashion and fluffy dogs called Mocha used as convenient class markers, the overt inequality of our society that drives the layers of our very identities, and crushes us ugly, complicit, addicted to what we do not have.
At the centre of the novel is a toying between two women, posed as opposites in access, both reeling from the brunt of their gaslighting lover. There are flickers of similarity, of rejection, hurt, of low self-worth; that this man takes what he wants from these women and leaves them disappointed that he has nothing to give. Yet, for the narrator, these similarities are only glimmers squashed in a world that privileges wealth and race over any sense of unifying female experience; while there is an open question, the potential of solidarity, to stop competing for the attention of their abuser, the stark reality is that one of these women has the space of a societal safety net and one does not. Whether one is happier than the other, however, is impossible to know.
We too enter this narrative world with no guarantees, no certainty. The momentum goes round and round and round obsessively and you keep hoping that something will click in this non-chronological story, that there will be a shift, for better or worse in the relationship stalemate. Perhaps, just perhaps, there will be an explosion or a decisive end. But, really, you just get sucked in deeper, like the narrator and her obsessive parasocial relationships as she stalks her prey online: worn out and reeling.
And what about its surprise popularity? Well, I can see why the novel’s gained so much attention: it’s very digestible, structured in short confessional bursts, with plenty of internet and meme culture references. It’s deliberately irreverent and positioned as wholly unserious (a real talent of the writing that it effortlessly comes across as blasé). The narrator’s voice is deliberately written from a position within the masses, a speaker who buys mass-manufactured furniture and eats tomatoes imported all year round because she only knows five recipes regardless of the season, the pull of fluorescent lights in a supermarket more familiar to her than a vegetable field. This novel speaks to resentment, the uglier sides of capitalism, our own personalities, and the dry humour of the online world that hyperbolises it all.
I was a fan of I’m a Fan, the cold hard critique nestled among the more typical longings against a toxic relationship. But I prefer writing that is less frantic, less ruminating (given my brain does that all by itself). Patel left me envious that she has so cleverly summarised the overt underbelly of London’s social structures, wrapped up with a more marketable love obsession, deliberately ugly at its heart, to seal the deal. I won’t be rushing back anytime soon to get stuck in the narrator’s swamp of concerns (not what any mental health professional ordered) but, my, what talent that the author was able to construct such a quagmire of mud that will stay lurking round the corners of my brain.
Get writing x
Eden
[Thanks Emily and Ellie for the recommendation]
Loved reading your thoughts on this & glad you’re a fan too!
The book reminds me of something I probably read on tumblr as an an angsty teen to do with people forgetting what you say to them but remembering how you make them feel - I can’t precisely remember the plot details of ‘I’m a Fan’ but I know it had an atmosphere like a panicky cold sweat that I’m sure will stay with me for a long time. Its depictions of power, revulsion and desire are so intensely uncomfortable yet so gripping - a case of can’t look but also can’t look away. I’m really drawn to Patel’s fierce and fearless style & hoping to read more from her! X