[Review] Followers by Megan Angelo

Followers by Megan Angelo

Rating: 4.5 stars

Published: January 14th 2020

Goodreads Synopsis:

An electrifying story of two ambitious friends, the dark choices they make and the profound moment that changes the meaning of privacy forever.
Orla Cadden dreams of literary success, but she’s stuck writing about movie-star hookups and influencer yoga moves. Orla has no idea how to change her life until her new roommate, Floss―a striving, wannabe A-lister―comes up with a plan for launching them both into the high-profile lives they so desperately crave. But it's only when Orla and Floss abandon all pretense of ethics that social media responds with the most terrifying feedback of all: overwhelming success.
Thirty-five years later, in a closed California village where government-appointed celebrities live every moment of the day on camera, a woman named Marlow discovers a shattering secret about her past. Despite her massive popularity―twelve million loyal followers―Marlow dreams of fleeing the corporate sponsors who would do anything, even horrible things, to keep her on-screen. When she learns that her whole family history is a lie, Marlow finally summons the courage to run in search of the truth, no matter the risks.
Followers traces the paths of Orla, Floss and Marlow as they wind through time toward each other, and toward a cataclysmic event that sends America into lasting upheaval. At turns wry and tender, bleak and hopeful, this darkly funny story reminds us that even if we obsess over famous people we’ll never meet, what we really crave is genuine human connection.

I'm full of thoughts about this book, because it's the type of book that leaves you thinking for a long time afterwards. A contemporary scifi that discusses the effects of social media and privacy? Fantastic.

I ended up rating it higher than my initial 4 stars because it's really sticking to me how good this is. And it did a great job of utilizing unlikable heroines, because the whole time I wasn't sure if I was rooting for Floss and Orla, but then at the end they definitely swayed me over to their side.

Floss and Orla are like if Snooki from Jersey Shore and Kim Ki-Jeong from Parasite decided to plot a heist together. They want to play the system of social media - Floss wants to be famous, and Orla wants to be a writer. But that isn't easy when the world of influencers and celebrities and fame exists. So they con their way through it. They're a perfect team, each so self-absorbed in their own ideas of fame that it blinds them to the consequences. And there are so many consequences.


Cue Marlow, who, thirty-five years later, is the product of everyone's social media and technological fixation. The government now runs the internet and what can be streamed - Marlow is one of many celebrities whose lives are broadcasted to the public 24/7 - on a service called Constellation. Everyone is also implanted with a chip that sends them information (as opposed to using phones or internet constantly).

Through a series of interconnected timelines, we retrace our steps between the present and the near-future to find out the secrets of our three heroines.

I'm going to be going at this from several angles, but mainly the literary analysis in me is jumping to discuss a lot of good devices used here.

Hyperbole. To be honest, is it even hyperbole if it can so easily be real life? There's an exaggeration of a lot of these characters, to show how far we're willing to go to get that like or retweet, just to be known with the unknown world. Aston Clipp is a great example of this.

So Austin changed his name to one of the fake ones his mother had come up with - Aston Clipp - and declared himself an artist. He traded in his Jordans for sandals and traveled the world, mainly amassing a collection of beaded bracelets. He sat shirtless atop the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and bothered monks in Tibet for selfies. He went to explore his roots in Japan, where he got bored of the customary bows and began to invent spontaneous dance moves in response to them. - p. 124

It's both ridiculous and not ridiculous because it makes sense. I'm pretty sure we've all seen that one person do something inane to this standard on social. And everyone is so willing to buy into this, to buy it all up. Orla and Floss just want to play the game in their favor, which works, for awhile.

I mentioned previously that it was hard for me to decide if I liked Orla and Floss. They both want to make it in NYC, and put on airs of pretentiousness that initially was off-putting. Floss truly is a caricature of Snooki (Atlantis to Atlantic City, Jersey Shore to Snooki, get it?) But really, they're both characters who want things, and will stop at nothing to get it. Even if it means stepping on people they care for to do it. I think that's pretty admirable.

More than anything else - to be an author, to have a boyfriend, to learn how it felt to breathe without being forty thousand dollars in debt - she wanted to answer the question. She was living in the before of something, and she was getting tired of it. The dangerous thing about the way she felt, Orla knew, was that she didn't know exactly what she wanted to happen, and she didn't care that she didn't know. Almost any change would do. - p. 30 

"I've done the math," Floss said. "I've done the actual math. There are eight million people here, and all of them want something as bad as I want what I want, as bad as you want what you want. We're not all going to get it. It's just not possible, that all these people could have their dreams come true in the same time, same place. It's not enough to be talented, it's not enough to work hard. You need to be disciplined, and you need to be ruthless. You need to do anything, everything, and you need to forget about doing the right thing." She released Orla with a little shove and put her hands on her hips. "Leave that shit to people in the Midwest." - p. 55

Orla herself is viewed as a background character, a secondary character to the louder Floss. But it is repeated time and time again that Orla does shine just as strongly as Floss does, with each calculated decision she makes. And though they're using each other to get what they each want, I think it's undeniable, by the very end, that they do care about each other, in some weird convoluted way.

While Orla and Floss's journey was more about the deconstruction of social media, Marlow's definitely had to be the story of a woman reclaiming her agency and the societal implications of motherhood. Marlow's life is so grossly controlled by Constellation that it's stifling. She's the face of a mood-altering drug Hysteryl (hysteria, women... of course) that controls her every thought. She isn't allowed to think for herself, until she's weened off the drug to have a child with Ellis. The whole thing is planned in advance, even the facial structure of the child. And everyone sees it as a necessity for Marlow to have a kid, like it's the next big thing following everything else she's done. But the moment the drug is out of her system, she sees everything so clearly.

Marlow is finally seeing the world for all its ugly truths through a combination of no longer using the drug and removing the chip (which can be analogous to how social media paints things in such a pretty light). Without spoiling anything, Orla ends up losing a lot of her agency because of the social media game she played. Marlow was born into it from the very beginning. Both of them end up reclaiming their agency once they relinquish social media.

"Do you think I should have a baby?"
Orla considers it, squinting. "Have you done everything else?"
Marlow pictures her wedding-day face, drab and peeling, in Times Square. She thinks of what everyone agrees on: she has always gone along. "No," she says. "I don't think I know what everything else is yet."
Orla leans forward. She takes Marlow's wax paper out of her lap and brushes the crumbs off her skirt. "Having a baby is one of the best parts of life," she says. "But still. It's only one of them." - p. 416

I think this conversation speaks a lot to how for women, having children is seen to be the only thing that defines their success when there is so much more out for them.

This book does a lot in 400ish pages. It also does this cool thing I call The Witcher effect where we're bouncing back and forth between timelines and garnering what happened in between with context clues. Is there a message to be gained from it? Don't use social media? Probably not. But don't let the patriarchy get you down.

A good book that surprised me the more I read. Definitely recommend.