A few months ago I picked up I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel on recommendation of my friend Alice, who said she’d pretty much swallowed the book whole. I began reading it and was equally ensnared. Then something happened to interrupt it – working on my own book, day job, Instagram, etc – and I put I’m a Fan aside, along with the three others I’m currently reading. Then I deleted Instagram off my phone and picked up I’m a Fan again. (Instagram just isn’t the same on desktop, I’ve learned – the appeal comes from being huddled over it, a private view of a most public space.)
I’m a Fan follows a narrator who is obsessed with an influencer – one of the other side chicks of a man she is having an affair with. Here’s how Patel describes her in a chapter titled ‘nepotism it girl’:
I live in the world of mass consumerism, picking out kitchenware and furniture from Ikea, pining for jewellery from Argos… My race blots out my individuality quite nicely. The woman I am obsessed with will only ever be an individual… Her food can be traced back to the seed, whereas mine is bought through a complex line of anonymised, automated, industrialised networks… She presents nettle-infused risotto in saucepans called donabe which I have to google ($500 from an “authentic” Japanese vendor)… She posts very simple recipes and people write comments like… “you have such a wonderful sensibility for arranging still life, utilizing natural light”… if the only thing I had to do all day was take a photo of what I bought at the farmers market then my photos would be a still life too.'
The narrator sneers and hate scrolls on, but the chapter ends with her semi-seriously considering buying one of the handmade clay candle holders featured on the influencer’s account. She muses on whether buying it will make her ‘a unique, rare and special person’ – ‘maybe the man I want to be with will want me… I will be something to show off owning’.
The book filled my Instagram void because of exactly this: how quickly intellectual superiority can turn into shopping, because Instagram is both an ideas marketplace and an actual marketplace. Desire gets tangled up with aspiration. I find it so interesting that she refers to the unnamed influencer as ‘the woman I am obsessed with’ and the guy she’s sleeping with as ‘the man I want to be with’. It’s like Instagram freezes us between who we are and what we want, and that frozen state is why I sometimes felt exhausted by the book. Nothing really changes. But because the chapters are short, sometimes as short as Instagram captions, the book feels almost designed for fragmented reading. (I’m reminded of a friend who told me he has a book for the sofa, a book for the bedroom, a book for the bathroom, a book for his commute…) Reading the book piecemeal made it feel more like a poetry collection than a novel, and because the language is often beautiful… well, I’m a fan!
P.S. Please research a company to check if it’s a scam before buying something on Instagram. I once bought a bunch of dresses off a site that looked pretty legit (…even though it was called Lynthia…) and the fabric was so flimsy that 8 pieces fit into a document envelope. My friend felt the fabric and described it as ‘extremely flammable’.
‘Where’s My Gnocchi Content, B****?’
I recently combined of two of my favourite recipes from two of my favourite food writers, who both happen to be called Ali: Crisp Gnocchi with Brussels Sprouts (NY Times) and Roasted Ratatouille (Alexandra Cooks). It was excellent. Sort of like a cheater’s pasta alla norma.
Before the NYT recipe, I did not know you could just throw pre-packaged gnocchi straight into the frying pan and it would cook in no time? Since I’ve learned this, I always have it in the cupboard, so I can saute it with whatever vegetable I have laying around for a lightning-quick meal, like a regular pasta dish minus the boiling.
Roasted ratatouille is not quick to cook but it feels that way, because all you have to do is chop a bunch of vegetables, put it in a pan, and leave it alone in the oven for a while, until it emerges as a multi-faceted edible being. What I mean is that you can water it down and eat it as soup, spread it on toast like jam, or mix it with pasta/gnocchi like a sauce. Top it with any cheese and it’s even better. It’s one of those dishes you can make on a Sunday and then re-purpose throughout the week without getting bored.
To make this particular gnocchi, all you have to do is put oil in a pan, saute the gnocchi until it’s a bit brown, then add as much roasted ratatouille as you’d like and mix them together until it looks done. If you don’t have roasted ratatouille around (fair enough!) you can finagle it by removing the gnocchi after it’s browned, sauteing common ratatouille veg like onions, tomatoes, courgettes/zucchini, aubergines for a bit (separate or together!), and add the gnocchi back in before serving with a wizard’s hat of Parmesan.
Other Cool Things:
Because loving one bastardised French dish isn’t enough: Tomato and Coconut Cassoulet from Anna Jones.
Ratatouille always makes me think of mon amie Lucie who makes the authentic version so well. A while back she wrote a piece on family and fiction that I refer to all the time as I write my book. One of my favourite quotes from it: ‘A fiction writer is, on some level, proclaiming their desire to play with uncertainty and transformation, maybe even trying to find out how they feel. But reality is even more ambiguous than fiction: relationships change, they move, they exist in time. Fiction only seems to pin things down, the way a photograph both captures the soul and reveals the unnerving impossibility of doing so.’ (Read the full article here.)