Liann Zhang on satirizing social media influencers from the inside

You go to events and people are like, 'how many followers do you have?' And if you don't meet a certain threshold you're suddenly like not in the group. There is a lot of that in reality but definitely these characters are a more extreme version.

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with Liann Zang, author of the new novel Julie Chan is Dead. In it, Julie Chan is in fact very much alive but her estranged twin sister Chloe, a wildly successful social media influencer, has suddenly died and it just so happens that Julie is for just a moment the only person in the world who knows Chloe is dead. So she decides to pick up and start living Chloe’s apparently fabulous life, letting the world believe it's Julie Chan's body being carried out of Chloe’s apartment on a stretcher.

Books mentioned in this conversation

• Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
• Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
• Bunny by Mona Awad

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