Novel as meme page

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Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on novel-specific moodboards, playlists, and meme pages.

In September, I wrote about the “aesthetic of bookishness” that I often encountered on social media, the online display of literary production and consumption, wherein books and authors are treated as marketable commodities. In 2023, the professional writer is expected to be a highly visible literary brand, in addition to doing the hard work of writing. Self-promotion, to frame it explicitly, becomes a form of ambient labor, an ongoing and necessary task. I assume many artists regard such promotional activities with quiet antipathy or angst, while acknowledging the economic necessity of amassing an audience: It’s a part of the job.

The inextricable link between the creative process and its visible performance online has been sufficiently belabored in literary thinkpieces and Twitter threads. This pursuit, however, doesn’t always have to be soul-sucking. I’ve noticed that writers seem to be shifting away from explicitly marketing their books and adopting a more curatorial role with the content they share online. Authors like Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life, To Paradise), Allie Rowbottom (Aesthetica) and Delia Cai (Central Places) have separate Instagram accounts, specifically for content and interviews related to their books. (The posts on Yanagihara’s Instagram and Tumblr accounts were managed by a separate photo editor, who commissioned and produced images for the books’ releases. Rowbottom and Cai handle their own accounts.) Some writers on literary Twitter have cultivated a large following by posting daily poems or snippets from passages of books they’re reading.

I’ve also encountered curated moodboards and playlists related to writing projects. This virtual collaging becomes part of a writer’s creative process, even before a book is formally published or sold. I have a writer friend who has a Spotify playlist for the main character of her in-progress novel, which features songs by BROCKHAMPTON, Lorde, Epik High, and Beach House. She told me she puts it on while going for long runs. The playlist helps her reflect on how her character might see the world: “It feels like I’m putting myself in her shoes,” she said.

Moodboarding is a practice that countless artists, designers, and other creatives have privately utilized for decades, and something that I’ve found to be a generative exercise. In assembling together pictures, texts, music, and other digital clippings, I can more easily tap into a general idea, mood, or theme and even discover parallels in the accumulated ephemera. It helps, too, that digital platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Are.na ensure that it’s as easy to share as it is to curate.

Jade Song, author of the forthcoming novel Chlorine, began constructing an “artistic lineage” for her book while completing the manuscript. Chlorine’s Instagram page is a scrapbook of film stills, prose passages, and art exhibits, loosely related to the feminine grotesque: painter Cecilia Vicuña’s Angel of Menstruation, a screencap from the coming-of-age body horror film Ginger Snaps, and an aqueous passage from Jackie Wang’s poetry collection.

“I created [my novel’s Instagram] account before I finished the manuscript, before I had an agent, and before I knew what I was doing (I still don’t),” Song told me over e-mail. “My agent and publishing team congratulated me for it as a fun publicity move but that wasn’t my intention … No art piece or artist works alone, even if they try to pretend they do. There are always traditions and lineages to pull from and be inspired by, and I wanted to highlight and celebrate and share them through the page.”

Meanwhile, Delia Cai’s account was created in the months leading up to Central Places’ January release and resembles more of a meme account, primarily featuring TikToks about the Midwest, Asian American identity, small town life, and holiday homecomings. “There are a lot of inside jokes in Central Places, and so the meme format is perfect for celebrating the thrill of catching those ‘if you know you know’ moments,” Cai told me. Cai recalled the height of A Little Life’s popularity in 2016 and 2017, when readers were taking photos on Lispenard Street where the novel’s characters lived: “It wasn't memes but I loved following the account because it was like a point of connection between the book and real life.”

These kinds of novel-related content and media — created by the author, their publicity team, or even fans — produce an intertextual effect, linking a standalone piece of fiction to other artworks and even contextualizing it in popular culture. For example, Rowbottom’s @annawrey account, named after Aesthetica’s protagonist, is formatted to resemble plastic surgery pages. Rowbottom needed to own the handle @annawrey so she could reference it in her book; she didn’t think too much about how having a separate Instagram account could affect the book’s marketing. Since Aesthetica’s release, Rowbottom has mostly used her main account to promote it, but likes that she can offer “bonus content” to those who seek out the character’s handle.

“I was inspired by the great meme glut of early 2021, in which Instagram meme accounts with multiple admins promoted all sorts of things, including novels,” Rowbottom said over e-mail. “It represents a divergence from old methods of promoting books, in which the author is a forward-facing spokesperson for their work.”

On social media, the act of curation is considered “a manifestation of smartness” — a buzzword that confers a kind of sophisticated intelligence. While the public nature of curation implies that its primary function is for viewers, I hope it also offers the curator something in return. According to one art director interviewed by Artsy, “a curator is someone who connects people and ideas and creativity and finds a way to create a universal language between them.” That definition also sounds a lot like writing. —Terry Nguyen

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Showtime removes a slew of original programming and will be renamed as Paramount+ on Showtime. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• The documentary— the “onscreen cousin of journalism” — is in its clickbait era. NY Mag’s Reeves Wiedeman on the corporate age of the documentary.

• New Yorker’s Richard Brody on his top Sundance picks: Ira Sachs’s Passages and Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson has a longer list of her favorite 17 movies to keep an eye out for.

  • I’m looking forward to Eileen, the adaptation of Otessa Moshfegh’s novel, starring Anne Hathaway; The Accidental Getaway Driver, which takes place near my Orange County hometown and is based on a gripping 2017 GQ feature; and a documentary of video artist pioneer Nam June Paik, Moon is the Oldest TV.

• The Atlantic’s Shirley Li on Jennifer Coolidge’s comeback.

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• RIP Gawker 2.0. I enjoyed Gawker’s incomplete ranking of media TikTok accounts. Missing from the list are the two best media TikTok guys: Dan Toomey (Morning Brew) and Jack Corbett (NPR’s Planet Money).

• Instagram co-founders are mounting a comeback with Artifact, a “TikTok for text.” (Platformer)

• It’s impossible to avoid low-quality junk on Amazon. Why does it feel like the shopping giant is making itself worse? (NY Magazine)

• “Data as pigment”: Refik Anadol’s shape-shifting digital canvas is on view at MoMA. The generative artist has created a machine-learning model based on data from MoMA’s public collection to produce the synthetic images. (Fast Company)

  • ArtNet critic Ben Davis takes aim at Anadol’s “purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art” and his uncritical, untroubled disposition towards technology.

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