‘If we value authenticity it’s because we’ve been bombarded since our impressionable preteen years with fakery but at the same time are uniquely able to recognize, because of the unspoiled period that stretched from our birth to the moment our parents had the screeching dial-up installed, the ways in which we casually commit fakery ourselves.’
Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts
Lauren Oyler (Photo by Pete Voelker).
What better time to read a novel set during the inauguration of Donald Trump than the week he hands the job over to Joe Biden? In Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts, I found a modern story that takes a brutally honest look at love, social media, identity, and authenticity.
Reading this book felt like I was inside the mind of a cynical millennial; the main character is unfiltered and flawed, but refreshingly self aware. From Googling ‘best 25 funeral invitation ideas’ on Pinterest to a whole heap of hot takes about social media, Oyler leaves nothing off the table. She is able to share everything with the reader in an almost meta understanding that she has your undivided attention.
If you like a stream of consciousness writing style, this book is definitely for you. The unnamed narrator is a professional blogger and the dialogue plays out like a long form piece she’s trying to make sense of as it comes to her.
Fake Accounts is scarily relatable at times, but it’s always witty.
—Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (HarperCollins Australia) is out now.
Fake Accounts
On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous Internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in Internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.
Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York – or be anywhere in particular – she flees to Berlin, and embarks on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life...
The best books we read in January 2021
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