Sex, Power, and the Shadow Self
Author Sheena Patel's Deep Reading List
The latest episode of Deep Read is out now, featuring a conversation with Sheena Patel, whose debut novel I’m a Fan was published in 2022. I picked up the book one Friday afternoon a few months ago and tore through it that weekend – it’s as addictive as the unhinged cyberstalking antics it depicts. Told through the frenzied inner monologue of one nameless female protagonist, I’m A Fan depicts the dark machinations of a toxic sexual relationship while surveying the equally toxic nuances of our social media age.
Sound intense? It is, and that’s what I liked about it. Sheena doesn’t shy away from writing about the very worst of our human impulses – in fact, she makes a deliberate choice to shine a light on them. As she said during our conversation:
“[The book] plays with the idea of shadow. Your deepest shame, the things that you fear, are embodied by someone who has those things that you want. That very thin line between jealousy and desire, when you fixate on something – is that because you want it, or do you want to kill it? Do you want to have sex with it? Or do you want to get rid of it? It's all really murky, and I thought that would be interesting to explore.”
The main character’s use of Instagram as her weapon of choice - both as a tool to inflict psychological self-harm and to do some pretty vicious stalking - is a plot point that Sheena acknowledges might age poorly. It’s also the reason this book resonates so deeply right now. Anyone who uses social media knows that it can offer moments of joyful human connection while simultaneously enabling utter self-destruction. This paradox is one of many that define our age. I’m a Fan skewers them all like a knife emoji.
Listen to the conversation here (and please do like, subscribe, and share with a friend if you enjoy the conversation!)
SHEENA PATEL: DEEP READING LIST (an epic one!)
Key words: Womanhood, Motherhood, Shadow Self, Sex and Sexuality, Dark Impulses, Power Dynamics, Instagram vs. Reality, Life of the Artist
I’m A Fan
“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 - Buy
Life with Picasso
“No one is indispensable to anyone else. You imagine you're necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I'm sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you'll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever feels best to you. Being someone's nurse is no way to live unless you're unable to do anything else. You have to say something on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that.”