REVIEW: "Unfollow Me" by Charlotte Duckworth
Since we moved him out of his crib, my toddler has gotten in the habit of wandering into my room every morning around 7:30am.
He toddles up to my side of the bed, because he can apparently detect that his father is a deep sleeper and no amount of tugging on the blanket or yelling directly into his face will rouse him.
A night owl by nature, I'm pretty much never ready to give up on sleep by the time he comes in, so I will often scoop him into bed, nestling him between his father and me, and let him have a little iPad screen time.
This morning, like clockwork, my eyes opened to a beseeching toddler who insisted he needed "brefast" right now.
Fortunately, he was able to be dissuaded from his original goal and agreed to some snuggles.
But today, unlike most days, I didn't inhale his sweet toddler scent and lull into a twilight sleep for a precious 30 minutes or so.
Instead, I grabbed my phone to check my notifications and, before I knew it, had fallen into a rabbit hole on Instagram.
Fueled by a mixture of curiosity and horror, I took a deep dive into an influencer's feed, moving picture by picture through her young son’s battle with cancer.
It was awful and unsetting and, all around, a horrible way to start your day.
And, as I hugged my toddler closer and regretted ever being annoyed by his slightly-earlier-than-I-would-like wake up calls, I wondered why.
Why would this woman want to let us see her darkest hours?
Why keep posting?
Why keep updating?
Doesn’t it hurt to share this pain with the world… or does it make it easier for you?
And as I pondered this, my mind, fuzzy due to a lack of coffee and an insufficient amount of sleep, drifted back to my most recent read, a novel prominently featuring a mommy blogger who, despite sharing all of her life for years, suddenly and mysteriously goes silent.
Influencers don’t necessarily have origin stories. But, if they did, Violet Young’s story would involve her battle with postpartum depression.
As an outlet for her complex and confusing emotions, this central character in Charlotte Duckworth’s Unfollow Me started a blog.
And a vlog.
And social media.
And due at least in part to the fact that the emotions she shared were ones to which other mommies could so easily relate, she managed to build quite the following.
While some women, certainly, follow her casually, others have all but made a career of it, building the viewing of Violet’s newest videos into their schedule as consistently as they do mandatory obligations like work and grocery shopping.
It is these most dedicated followers that are hit hardest when Violet suddenly disappears one day, taking down her social media profiles and her blog.
Lily, a single mom working as a veritable errand girl at a startup in London, feels the absence of Violet most acutely. Though she loves her son, Archie, she has been struggling for quite some time to find things to enjoy in her own life and has taken to living vicariously through Violet.
Now Violet’s absence leaves a gaping hole in Lily’s existence. One that she struggles to fill just as she struggled to find normalcy again after the death of her husband, Archie’s father, years earlier.
Though she’s in a very different place in her life than Lily, Yvonne has also built spending time on Violet’s channels into her daily routine. Relatively nearly married to a younger man, Yvonne and her husband are struggling to conceive their first child.
And as she plows through failed treatment after failed treatment, she watches Violet’s lovely life, so different — and more perfect — than her own, with an almost pathological regularity.
While the logical response to an online presence disappearing would be simple to pluck another personality from the abundance available online, neither Lily nor Yvonne are willing to do this.
Lily is dedicated to finding out what happened to Violet and is willing to do anything, no matter how questionably morale, to learn the truth.
Yvonne also feels compelled to solve this unexpected mystery. Though her motivation is different. She’s fueled by the knowledge that she and Violet have a shared history and that, in truth, she may have some culpability in her disappearance from the public eye.
One of the things that became immediately apparent as I read this book is that there is a lot more connecting these women than initially meets the eye. And discovering these connections is really the most engaging part of this novel.
Duckworth did a masterful job of parsing out information, both about the character’s backstories and the current situation in which they’ve all found themselves. This effective pacing allowed the story to evolve and the conflict to develop seemingly organically.
Just like when I dove into that social media profile this morning, scrolling till my thumbs ached, the further I got into this novel the more I felt I intimately knew these women.
What’s more, even though their actions seemed illogical and are — I like to think — ones I would never take, because of the depth with which she developed their characters, I could understand why they were acting as they were.
I could accept these actions as, at least to them, seemed logical.
Paradoxically, though, despite the fact that I found the discovery of these characters’ inner workings to be the most satisfying part of this novel, my largest gripe with this work also pertains to the characters.
Specifically, I found the fact that they — every last one of them — were so irrevocably flawed to be problematic.
If you’re a regular Drink.Read.Repeater, you will know that I love a flawed character.
But, in this case, I started to struggle to believe that every single female character that inhabited this novel was… well… pretty profoundly messed up.
And, I know, I know — we all have our own issues. But am I really to believe that everyone involved in the action of this novel is just profoundly fucked up?
Meh, I don’t think so.
Despite this grievance, though, this novel did keep me rapt from start to finish.
Though I was less willing to bend the rules to get my answers, I, too, wanted to know what happened to Violent.
And, when I finally found out, I was authentically surprised.
With skillful pacing and deeply developed, albeit flawed as fuck, characters, this Charlotte Duckworth novel leaves readers guessing until the very end.
It earns 4 out of 5 cocktails.
How do you feel about sharing children on social media? While some people literally make a career out of it, I know lots of people who, as a rule, don’t post pictures of their kiddos. What’s your policy and why? Tell me about it in the comments, below.
Moving right along to my next read. If you want to follow along, subscribe to updates in the sidebar on the right and follow me on Goodreads.
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