What is the emotional cost of visibility, of fame? By Divya Maniar, author of After Care

We too often write reality television off as a mindless form of entertainment. Yet it draws attention to some of the biggest questions of our contemporary moment. What is the emotional cost of visibility, of fame? What do our parasocial relationships say about us?

So many of our interactions are now structured by the mechanisms of social media. Is love possible, in these conditions? Is care? As somebody who grew up online, I’m fascinated by the reality star turned influencer as a modern-day canary in the coal mine.

That’s why I wrote Grace, my protagonist, who won a reality show called Speed Daters and emerged to sudden fame, only to feel it dissipate. I wanted to take her interiority seriously in my debut novel After Care, just as I wanted to take seriously subjects that are too often dismissed as frivolous or unworthy of our critical engagement: social media popularity, reality television soft-scripting, influencer friendships and fandom.

The novel meets Grace at the end of a tailspin; a couple of years have passed since her fifteen minutes of fame, and she sits alone in her apartment watching reruns of the now-cancelled show that had once promised her so much. That night, two events take place that violently tear her out of the mundanity of her routine: an intruder breaks into her home, and she learns of the tragic death of her on screen rival. Suddenly, interest in Grace picks up again as people rewatch Speed Daters out of morbid curiosity.

Through the novel, we watch Grace treat identity, trauma and pity as capital as she struggles to cling to her new shot at fame. I wanted to prod, through her, at the question: how far would somebody be willing to go to keep this attention? And what mechanisms of self-surveillance are at play as she grasps at it, in constant awareness of eyes which may or may not be there. We watch her tumble back into the arms of her awful ex-boyfriend, who was her show sweetheart, because she is convinced that people like her better when they are together. We watch her capitalize on the misfortune of her former rival, because she believes this might win her pity.

We watch her go all the way to a cabin in the remote wilderness, only for her to start filming ‘off-the-grid’ content there. How much of her behavior is consumed by her fear of anonymity? Has she curated herself so completely that nothing real is left?

I wrote this novel during one of my prolific eras of media consumption, post-pandemic when I could hardly bring myself to watch anything but reality television. I found myself bingeing entire seasons only to forget the stars which I rooted for and reviled only days before. Then I found myself wondering, where are they now? More importantly, perhaps: who are they now? I wanted to try answer the question for myself.

Grace might seem from the outset like an extreme character. So self-serving, so self-pitying and desperate to be seen. But the more I wrote in her voice, the more I began to recognize her. She’s somebody who’s been betrayed by the empty promises of online validation, and who’s trapped in an awful feedback loop of scrutiny and reactive self-invention. She’s somebody I know unsettlingly intimately, and I’m probably so unsettled by her because I’m afraid to admit to myself how easy it would be to become her.