“The man I want to be with is transfixed by his indecision. This is where the drama is for him, all grist for the mill, all these women waiting on his word and it energies him, propels him as he moves out into the world, conquering it with his ideas.” ― Sheena Patel, I’m a Fan
I’m A Fan: A Novel
Sheena Patel
Finalist for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize
Longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023
Sheena Patel’s novel is brutal and unflinching. It is easy to forget, with all the friendly images of food lovingly prepared and the immaculate neutral toned spaces that we don’t really know the people we follow at all. “I’m A Fan” examines the false intimacy created by social media as well as power dynamics, relationships, class, gender, and representation.
The novel examines the power dynamics in play. Patel explains this far better. I’ll leave you with this quote:
“Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants 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? If only we could all be buffered from exploitatively neoliberal regimes by family money and luxuriously austere domestic settings.”
― Sheena Patel, I’m a Fan
K.M. Crane 