"You’re taken a bit more seriously the less online you are"

A very good/online beach read, and a chat with its author

I’m writing today’s edition from the lounge at the Buffalo airport,¹ where I ordered an 11 (!) a.m. margarita before settling in for a little ~light work.~ The TSA agent called me honey. The people at the bar were pounding scotch. We’re heading into that glorious time of year — that precious, fleeting, blessed time of year — when almost everyone’s on vacation, literally or mentally, and the other nine months feel worth the slog.

During this time of year — the vacation season — I like to read a specific type of book. The dour months are for literary fiction and classics and expanding one’s mind … but I best have a beach read in my bag if I’m drinking a double-strong marg before noon. 

What constitutes a good beach read? Now THAT is an eternal question. It should, in my personal, humble opinion, be breezy and fun. I should never need to reread a page to understand it, and I shouldn’t lose the plot if I’m mildly buzzed. A good beach read, moreover, will make me think after I’ve read it. (Not a lot or unpleasantly, but — a bit.) And the writing will be clever and propulsive, sans any bad descriptions of sex acts that make me wish I were celibate.² 

This is all preamble to this week’s Q&A, with the author of a very good/very online beach read that came out yesterday. It’s called Such a Bad Influence, and — like many a classic of the genre — it’s a thriller concerned with somebody disappearing. But the disappeared person, in this case, is a mega-influencer reared from childhood to perform for the internet. And its author,

Olivia Muenter

, is herself a recovering Instagram influencer, with the aesthetic grid, day-in-the-lifes and battle scars to prove it. (Your unaesthetic narrator cameos in this one a few seconds in.)

oliviamuenter

A post shared by @oliviamuenter

It’s that juxtaposition that first intrigued me: Such a Bad Influence is a novel about the perverse incentives of online fame, written by someone who has experienced them first-hand. The story follows Hazel Davis, normie sister of superstar @evelyn, as she seeks to disentangle her missing sister’s real life from the character she plays for her online audience. There are several major twists, the last of which — in the veryyyy final pages — changed my understanding of the entire book. The plot also touches on a number of Links-relevant debates, from the nature of online performance to the rights of child influencers.

Long story short: I really enjoyed this book, so I was delighted when Olivia agreed to chat about it last week. Among other things, we discussed the pains of self-promotion, the reputational price that women pay for being “too” online and the point at which Instagram becomes unhealthy.

In addition to writing fiction, Olivia co-hosts the podcast Bad on Paper and writes a Substack. This interview has been edited for flow and clarity. Please enjoy it!!

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Hey Olivia!

Hi, sorry — I literally just clicked “join meeting” and my dog started freaking out the second I hit the button.

No, I know the feeling — I’m late to this meeting because I could not get my camera to work on my brand-new computer. So that feels … good. Anyway! 

Thank you so much for taking the time for this. I loved your book. You’re the first author interview I've done, actually, and I’m excited about that. I guess a logical place to start would be to talk a little bit about your personal relationship with social media. You have worked as an Instagram influencer yourself. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience?

Sure, yeah — I mean, we could go all the way back. I've been on social media basically since high school, but I didn't really start gaining any sort of a following until college. After I graduated, I was a beauty and fashion editor [at Bustle] and I built up more of a following naturally that way. Then I quit my job in 2019 to go freelance full-time. 

I was writing for just about any online publication I could — doing these stories for $50 each or whatever. That’s kind of how I started building up more of an influencing career, because I realized I could spend literally one-twelfth the time and make twelve times the money on Instagram.

What was that like? I have to imagine influencing is actually quite a slog. 

Well, if you’ve read the book — which you have! — you know that I have mixed feelings about it. I was so grateful, because I was really struggling to make a full income as a freelancer. To have just a little bit of an audience, and to be able to make a little bit of money that way — I felt good about it.

At the same time, I became very tuned into these corners of the internet where occasionally my name would pop up, and I’d become obsessed with trying to account for criticism. People in my DMs were wildly supportive and kind, for the most part. But I would see one tiny bad comment somewhere else and it would devastate me. I’d feel like I was doing something wrong or not well enough, or that I wasn’t being “real” enough — and it broke my brain. You can't edit yourself in real time like that. It doesn't work. And you can’t win over everyone — that's not how life works, generally, and it certainly is not how the internet works.

It definitely is not. What about as a consumer — can you tell me about your relationship with social media on that end? 

On the consumer side, I've always had a complicated relationship with social media — mostly in terms of consuming too much of it and comparing myself to other people's lives. You know: the things that we know better than to do but still do anyway. I find it really fascinating that even after 15 years of having social media, I still haven't figured out how to have a super-healthy relationship with it.  

At what point does consumption become “unhealthy,” would you say? Like how do you know when you’ve crossed that line?

I sometimes feel like I don't have much control over how much time I'm spending on social media. Like it's so compulsive that I'm just spending hours of time online without even consciously choosing it. That’s what I struggle with. 

I had a really unhealthy relationship with Instagram stories in particular — they make it so easy to just keep going infinitely, there’s no stopping point. Before you even choose it, you’re watching the next story and the next story and so on. It’s hard to consume all these other people’s lives when maybe you're not in the best mental place for it. Maybe I’m already feeling bad about myself, and now I've just watched 20 people whose lives are somehow better than mine or who are prettier than I am. 

I mean, it's all really basic “here's-why-social-media-is-bad-for-you” stuff, but it still gets under your skin. Or it gets under my skin, I should say. 

This kind of starts to get at one of the themes in the book that was striking to me — and it comes out most at the very end, but I think I can still talk about it broadly without giving anything away. There’s this notion that social media, or maybe influencing specifically, is inherently deceptive. That there’s something wired into the design or culture of these platforms that encourages people to be untruthful or manipulative, sometimes in ways that are really antisocial. 

I wondered if we could talk about that a little bit — is that representative of your personal views of social media? 

Yeah, that's definitely the note I was trying to strike. I think the thing that I always come back to with social media is not that people are signing on and thinking, “I’m going to post something that is a lie.” I think it’s more that once you realize someone is out there consuming what you say, you inherently start to edit yourself. Maybe without fully realizing it. 

People like to praise influencers who are “so real” or “so authentic.” But I think it’s impossible to be quote-unquote “real” on the internet, because whether you have 10 followers or 10,000, you start to tailor yourself to what’s going to get more likes or what reads as most “relatable” to your audience. We’re walking that line constantly. But that’s not a true version of anyone. I don’t think it’s intentional or evil, necessarily, but I think that when you're constantly making calculations about what to share, it's not going to be authentic.

How do the mechanics of social media heighten that, do you think? Because on some level I agree with you, of course, social media is a performance … but so is every social interaction. Like, I’m performing for you now. I want you to like me. And I imagine you’re also performing for me, to a certain extent. How are those interactions, which are not mediated by social media, different from the ones that are?

Oh gosh. I mean — that's a really good question. It's true that we’re all performing all the time, but I think that social media gives us a level of control that we don't have in other interactions, and that makes it easier to manipulate them, whether intentionally or not. If I’m interacting with someone in real life, they’re seeing a 3-D, real-time version of me. I can’t crop that or choose my angles. I can’t show you one corner of my room and trick you into thinking the room is neat if you’re standing here with me. 

There’s no Facetune for real life. Yeah. Do you think Instagram could be redesigned to make it less performative? 

I don't know how they could change that. I don't know. It's interesting, because when Instagram launched Stories, I think part of the idea there was that they would be more organic, more real-time and less edited than grid posts. But that didn’t happen — they’re the same thing. People are just sharing more of them.

Did you base the influencers in the book off any real-life people? Maybe you can’t tell me that. 

There's no one that's inspired by one specific influencer, but they’re all an amalgamation. You'll probably be able to assign certain people based on certain traits, but no — there wasn't one single model for them. The characters were informed by stereotypes of influencers, too — I wanted to play into that, but give them a bit more dimension. 

Do you still think of yourself as an influencer? This feels a little bit like a breaking-the-fourth-wall question — but I imagine you have to do a lot of brand-building and promotion around this book. And that struck me as ironic and interesting, given that the book’s view of online influence is ultimately pretty negative. 

Yeah, it’s very meta when you think about the book I’ve written. It’s very complicated! I’m trying to create a social calendar around this book that is critical of social media.

Can you take me into that a little more? How do you deal with that cognitive dissonance? How do you chart a course for yourself amidst all those complicated feelings you have about social media? 

I'm still figuring it out. I really want to keep writing books. And so I need to promote it as much as I can, to film a day in the life or whatever, even though I know that’s “performative” and that it plays into stereotypes about influencers. 

I feel like, I don't know — as long as I’m doing content that seems true to me and that's serving my purpose, which is writing and sharing these ideas, then it feels okay. But it’s hard. I’ve cut back on actual influencing significantly in the past year.

Have you read that Rebecca Jennings article that went super viral a few months ago, about how all artists need to self-promote all the time now? It was controversial, I think, because one of the implied criticisms Rebecca makes is that artists and writers and other creatives now spend so much time on social media that they no longer devote adequate time to the work itself. Do you feel that tension at all?  

I feel tension in terms of the immense pressure on authors, specifically, to promote the hell out of their books. Publishers are strapped. They don't have as much capacity to put publicity behind it. I've been super lucky with my publisher, Quirk — I feel very supported in every possible way. At the same time, I know part of the reason that they wanted to work with me is because I have a platform, and so I can't just ignore that. I want to be as successful as possible. As much as it pains me to beg people on Instagram to pre-order the book. 

What about in terms of the time you're able to spend on your writing? How do you divide not just your time, but also your mental and creative energy between the *doing* of the work and the *promoting* of the work? 

I don't really think about promotion in that way. Unfortunately I'm so used to being on social media all the time that I do it pretty organically without thinking about it. For the last two weeks leading up to the book release, I was more formal about it and thought up a content plan. But before that, it’s just been any way I can post about it and share it that’s creative.

I am working on another book now, and that’s very difficult because my brain is elsewhere. There is this fear of: “Am I going to get to pub day and feel like I didn’t do enough? Could I have posted more times? Could I have done more podcasts?” On the flip side, you see authors that do very little. I kind of touch on this in the book, but it seems that you’re taken a bit more seriously the less online you are — which I think is inherently sexist, and also very complicated to navigate and balance. 

I’m intrigued to hear you say that. Are you anxious about being taken less seriously because you're so online and you wrote such an online book? 

Oh, for sure. Yeah. One of the main reasons that the book is not told from an influencer’s perspective — it’s told from the perspective of her sister, instead — is because I genuinely don't think that a lot of people want to read a book from an influencer, because it’s not “real” or “serious.” When you’re very online, you face this judgment of “don’t you have something more serious or better to do?” But this is how I built an audience. This is what I have and I’m going to use it to support this work that I really want to do. 

We talked a little bit at the top about some of your negative experiences as an influencer — the negative comments, the need for external validation. I’d love to bring this full circle and talk a bit about how you weaned yourself off that. Because it’s not just a challenge for influencers, right? The constant feedback loop is a challenge for anyone who exists online. So how did you get off that train? 

For me, what really helped was going back to the core truths of what I know about myself as a person, outside of who I am on social media and outside of what other people see. The things that are unchanging. Sorry, this is verging into therapy-speak. 

But I honestly don't know how else to talk about it, because it is a psychological, emotional experience to be online. To always know if friends went to an event I wasn’t invited to, or to see that no one liked something I posted. I think that experience is fairly universal. 

So yeah, I try to go back to those things that I know — if social media went away tomorrow, who would I be? What would I know is true? And that's helped me a lot. 

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Such a Bad Influence came out yesterday, June 4. You can buy it anywhere, BUT if you buy it through a link in this newsletter, I’ll get a small commission. 

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Until the weekend! Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

1. Pleased to report that, by the time I finished editing this transcript, I had arrived safe and sound in my destination. That would be ST. PETERSBURG, Florida, where tomorrow I’m giving a 90-minute talk on AI and journalism … please send thoughts and prayers, I will need them.

2. ONE exception: My breakout beach series of last summer was the ACOTAR books, even though the writing (especially the sex scenes, yikes) is genuinely very bad. You can use that knowledge to discount my recommendation here, that’s fine, but don’t knock the fairy smut until you’ve tried it.