A relationship with an older man is what the protagonist of Sheena Patel’s 2022 novel I’m a Fan desires, because, she believes, then the waiting can stop and “my real life can begin.” She describes her affair with this man—a wealthy, older, white visual artist, admired by many in real life and on social media—as a way of securing “a seat at the table.” It’s not love she’s looking for, but a way into a more secure and contented adulthood: “I want to be with him so he can take care of my bills,” she confesses.

Romance, here, is just the process that arises when a propertyless feminized cultural worker tries to secure her place among those—like this artist adored by millions online—who do not face her struggles. Romantic obsession bleeds into aspirational labor: If she could only make the target of her desire love her back, she imagines that she would have instant access to legions of fans, and secure the contracts that would enable her to make some decent money. In other words, trying to establish something solid with this wealthy artist is itself a job of sorts—one of the many things she is doing to attempt to stay afloat in an industry that isn’t giving her much. She is just one among countless many. She refers to his other lovers as fans who indulge his behavior, and she imagines her devotion to him as a form of investment of attention: “I am owed profit, growth, a reward as I have given so much, I am an early investor, I deserve some payback for my loyalty. At what point do I get a return on my investment?”

Patel is pinpointing something that happens every day across social media, as millions return time after time to scrutinize closely the same accounts. To the people who run those accounts, each discrete follower is a faceless no one; but, to the individual user, the online personalities that they follow can take on immense importance. “How does he fill my entire life,” asks the narrator, “and I am only a sliver of his.” How is he the font of cultural capital and the emotive center of so many lives, while she is just one of the unimportant countless many vying for this attention? She states, starkly: “I am no one. I’m a fan and because of this, I can be cut out.”

The embattled mentality of Patel’s protagonist is a product of power and class in the creative economy. The novel’s style provides further caustic response to these same phenomena, while putting it in the category of texts studied in Anna Kornbluh’s 2024 tour de force monograph, Immediacy, which offers a withering appraisal of dominant modes of contemporary writing that are very much in evidence in Patel’s I’m a Fan. The industrial conditions of writing today, argues Kornbluh, are reproduced in the form of an aesthetics of “immediacy,” which does little more than chart individual experiences. Kornbluh skewers contemporary autofiction and the growing dominance of first-person narration as self-emission that is unable to see its own social constituents, reflecting a growing absence of faith in the power of art to do anything at all of significance. Such immediate fiction, she worries, fails to offer readers the level of abstraction from individual circumstances that can illuminate our social situation, and that can thereby—or so Kornbluh argues—cohere new forms of solidarity grounded in shared experiences and desires.

But while Kornbluh views the style of immediacy as a signal and catalyst of disempowerment, Patel, for her part, uses that same style—autofiction, first-person narration, and confessionalism—as part of her totalizing exposé of the industry of cultural production: Men remain in the top positions, people from backgrounds of cultural wealth and with prestigious university degrees are in control, and becoming a social media influencer is one of the clearest paths to making any money. Starting from nothing usually means indulging in what social media demands: constancy of self-performance, self-branding, drawing upon what is at hand—that is, personal experience: “Pornographic trauma ballads,” the narrator states, “for a little bit of status.” In this light, the immediacy of Patel’s novel is not an unknowing reproduction of existing trends, nor even merely recourse to the self in the absence of other resources. Instead—and despite what Kornbluh argues—the style of I’m a Fan is a deliberately deployed and self-conscious strategy, one responding to and critiquing the classed and racialized work of writing in the UK.

Kornbluh argues that ours is an “era of narcissism” that “does not perceive its own structural causes.” But what I am suggesting is somewhat different. I’m a Fan undertakes a self-conscious project that theorizes this narcissistic immediacy itself. Patel skewers not narcissism per se but rather the conditions that make it a necessary recourse. The performance of narcissism is a demand put upon people trying to find a foothold in an industry in which more and more new content comes ever more quickly, an intensification that coincides both with concentration of resources in ever fewer hands and with the proliferation of demands on our attention.

“Immediacy’s surfacing of extreme affect poses as liberatory—authentic, righteous, spontaneous, unrepressed,” Kornbluh argues. Perhaps. But immediacy may also be an aesthetic manifestation of a situation in which people are trying, and often failing, to break through the barriers that control who has access to cultural careers. There is no liberatory moment here.

Every day, Patel’s protagonist focuses her attention less on the man she dreams of dating and more on another woman who he is also involved with, whose social media profile she finds herself obsessing over. Unlike our narrator, this other woman is wealthy and white and part of the cultured elite. She sells expensive lifestyle items like scarves and pottery via a web shop (and occasional pop-up) called Terroir, promoted via Instagram. There are gardening tools (£400 to £800), handmade leather boots (£900), photogenic handwoven baskets (£750). A curated web shop is “the new rich kid thing to do,” the protagonist remarks. It’s an add-on to a person’s existing successes. The woman who runs it thanks her social media followers for “supporting a small business.” They keep up with her account, engage with her posts, and come to her pop-up shop. “Small business” suggests a plucky entrepreneur without substantial capital, taking a risk on a dream; but for the owner of Terroir, who is already rich, and includes this among a suite of other projects, there is little to fear if the business fails. She is even able to leverage her connections and minor online celebrity to secure a book deal, despite having no interest in being an actual writer.

All this is possible for her precisely because she is part of a wealthy and cultured milieu, who feed on the narrator’s sustained interest and emotional investment. It is a world made up of social media influencers who can monetize their accounts because the narrator is just one among so many others who keep returning every day to look at their carefully curated lives—with envy.

Envy and resentment. Our protagonist lives with her boyfriend in a shabby rented apartment. “I don’t own anything,” she remarks blankly—and that’s precisely the point. I’m a Fan is about the distance between those who own and those who don’t. She recognizes that her obsession with wealthy online women has something to do with a deep desire for herself to be the one celebrated. Being celebrated would mean that her life would be easier. “A fanbase is how we will get the advances, how we secure the invitations to prestigious awards,” she imagines. “One day maybe we will even get to cosplay at being a gatekeeper by becoming one of the judges of a well-regarded prize.”

What the protagonist is ultimately a fan of is the fantasy of being a different person: someone with money; someone with culture. Because it is not just wealth that she lacks, but also ease with cultural knowledge. She feels an attendant burden of shame because her life has not afforded access to such things: “Perhaps what I want is the disposable cash to be able to buy a painting but actually what I want is something much harder to attain which is to know what paintings are worth buying in the first place.” I’m a Fan is the story of someone who participates in the circulation of cultural prestige, buying into it and enshrining it by obsessing over those in command over it. She also at the same time hates the value of her envy and consumption of elite lives online: the way they prey upon her interest and engagement, benefitting from her class-based feelings of inadequacy and lack.

“I’m a Fan” undertakes a self-conscious project that theorizes narcissistic immediacy itself. Patel skewers not narcissism per se but rather the conditions that make it a necessary recourse.

Many recent novels cover similar ground. Keiran Goddard argues that this has to do with skyrocketing rents. In response to the UK’s housing crisis, writers have been producing “real-estate novels,” Goddard states: novels that explore how lack of access to affordable housing “shapes and misshapes us.” Goddard points out that novels are often shorter now and more fragmented, because people are worrying and working too much at other things, often on social media, preventing them from producing anything more sustained and cohesive. (Patel’s work is short and disjointed; chapters vary in length from just a paragraph to a few pages). So many novels’ protagonists now “live lives characterised by scarcity and insecurity,” and home is not a space of comfort. “The atmosphere is one of anxiety,” Goddard writes, attending “a peripatetic type of extended adolescence, in which protagonists are locked out of the future and waiting for life to begin in earnest.”

Literary writers are experiencing this insecurity acutely. In our moment, a lot of content circulates for free or very cheaply via digital platforms. (In Kornbluh’s account, autofiction, memoir, social media, and personal essays belong on “a continuum of auto-emission” that is popular now because of the desperate and consequential intensification of “circulation” resulting from our situation of economic downturn. To propel circulation, cultural production takes advantage of an intensifying “psychic peculiarity of contemporary life” that is the “abundance of narcissism.”) Sizeable advances are becoming increasingly rare, authors’ medium earnings are declining, and a writer can work years to build a presence online as a way of attracting a proper publisher. Add to this the rising cost of tuition, food, and rent, and it is nearly impossible for indebted writers, without existing wealth, to devote themselves entirely to the craft. They are holding down other jobs. They are finding themselves, in Goddard’s words, “snatching time to write here and there on commutes and in the stolen hours before or after work.”

All this is certainly true for Patel, who has continued to work in the creative industries while venturing into publishing her first works. It is also true of the protagonist of I’m a Fan, who barely entertains the fantasy of being a published writer. She shrugs off compliments about her talent. She keeps her day job doing badly paid promotional work, supporting other people’s aspirations instead. “I’ve got in my own way again,” Patel’s narrator states, when moving in with her parents after breaking up with her boyfriend and leaving their shared apartment: “Wish I could have another go at life where I had a more regular wage and was less concerned about expressing myself.” Thus, I’m a Fan is very much a real-estate novel.

But Patel’s novel is also a real-estate novel that looks at the experience of being propertyless through a gendered eye. In an article on a recent surge of “Hit Me” narratives—meaning books in which women enjoy being hurt by a lover—Namwali Serpell notes that the “culture at large tilts womanward of late.” A massive transformation is at work beneath this shift. While the CEOs of the major publishing houses continue to be men, women now make up a growing proportion of the publishing workforce, including at executive levels. There has at the same time been a significant boom in women’s fiction. A recent NPR headline went so far as to claim that women now “dominate” publishing. An article in The Guardian announced that women have “conquered” the industry. They neglect to mention that publishing jobs are increasingly badly paid and freelance. It’s a classic case of the feminization of work: As labor conditions have been degrading, women are making up a greater percentage of the workforce.

Here, then, is where we should place the “Hit Me” story, along with the gendered real-estate novel (and they are often one and the same): at the intersection between gendered work and money. These are stories featuring a poor young woman’s “romance” with a richer older man who has property and status. The list includes Jade Sharma’s Problems (2016), Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020), and Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special (2023). However different their plots, they all highlight the realities of being a young creative woman in increasingly difficult economic circumstances. They depict self-directed creative work as at best a nonpaying hobby; as a career it is a near impossibility for people without the right connections or wealth to fall back on. As in I’m a Fan, in these works connection to older wealthier men means the promise of exit from economic exigency, and relationships are characterized by tense negotiations of domination and subservience, ambivalence and self-hatred.

Writing in the style of immediacy “cuts out the middleman,” Kornbluh argues, concentrating everything in the figure of the author and thus “immanentizing circulation.” I’m not sure that it does. If anything, immediacy amplifies dependence on new middlemen who need to notice you (middle digital agents like followers, tastemakers, influencers, algorithms), and it amplifies subordination to the platform and publishing-company owners who have never heard of you, who could not care less about your story, but who are anyway somewhere profiting from every single act of cultural production and consumption.

Kornbluh sees immediacy aesthetics as, at base, a constant affirmation of selfhood: Every expression wants to be affirmed; the author writes to be praised; the influencer posts to be adored; and so on: “Affirmation is the flat mutuality that immediacy style most often solicits,” she writes, memorably. But I’m a Fan suggests something else. Patel’s work points out a path for creative work not so much wanting to be affirmed, as wanting to be in a whole new situation where one would not need to want to be affirmed.

“I want a hungry press, hungry for me,” Patel’s protagonist states, “rather than jumping for scraps of attention like some rapid dog scrabbling around in the pit of my stomach desperate for someone to listen to what I have to say.” Desperation for attention is an almost inevitable affect for writers now—an industry command. To push back against it is to risk consigning yourself to the oblivion of being unknown. It’s a gravitational pull that exerts its force especially against people who are starting with few resources and working in what can reasonably appear to be intractable conditions.

Patel’s narrator doesn’t have a prestigious degree—the less wealth in your family the less likely that you would, we know—but she can monetize her own experience because it is what she can offer by way of lucrative content. Thinking about the kind of woman she envies, she reflects: “I position myself against her overly educated cerebral language. My knowledge is centred around my bodily responses so I can ground myself with authority and hide all the theory I just do not know.” In other words, attention to her own gendered and racialized experience not only manifests, but also attacks, a lack of access to other cultural and material resources. The woman she is obsessed with does not need to fight in this way. She is pardoned, “because of the life she was born into and benefits and access she is given.” She has arrived preordained with the correct treasure trove of cultural knowledge and references to appeal to, no need to dwell at length on any raw volatility and vulnerability of experience, let alone draw upon them to produce content.

In turn though, and in contrast, what the protagonist is in unique possession of is her awareness of her functioning in a whole cultural system, whose power dynamics seem invisible or unimportant to those who are at ease in it. Immediacy, here, is an aesthetics of ambivalent aspiration, within a hierarchically ordered and immobilizing class- and race-based cultural system. To critique Patel’s writing as mere self-emission or “memoirization” would assume too much about its proximity to her own experiences. It would also fail to credit how carefully I’m a Fan contextualizes and situates the aesthetics of immediacy itself: as a means of access to an industry of cultural production that is otherwise beyond one’s reach and that, whatever style you deploy, still takes more from you than you ever get back.