They Came to See Us Suffer

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Knopf, 400 pages. 2026.

Made You Look by Tanya Grant. Berkley, 368 pages. 2025.

I Could Be Famous: Stories by Sydney Rende. Bloomsbury, 272 pages. 2026.

Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg. Avid Reader Press, 288 pages. 2026.

An essay on influencers could start with Marx, or theories of performance, or how doctrines of personal branding first promulgated in the 1990s have forged an unholy union with new technologies of exposure and surveillance. But you’re probably reading this on the internet, and I’m afraid you’ll click away. So let’s begin with a beautiful blonde woman whose future is uncertain, who needs your help, who wants you to watch.

Sydney Sweeney, the latest ingénue anointed by what remains of the star system, presents a test case in the evolution of celebrity. She has dutifully done everything required of a young actress ascending to stratospheric fame: prestige TV, a superhero movie, horror, romantic comedy, a chameleonic turn in a film of unmistakable seriousness (the 2023 whistleblower drama Reality), a sweaty de-glammed role (as a female boxer in Christy), and, not least, an abundance of nude scenes. But it is when she most resembles an influencer that she most touches the common culture. Christy bombed at the box office, but everyone saw her “good jeans” ad.

Are influencers the new starlets? Though influencers lack the cultural authority and institutional backing of Hollywood actresses, they perform similar functions in a media system organized around short-form algorithmically circulated video. Both Actress and Influencer are figures of fantasy, projection, identification, and parasocial attachment, the latter a debased—or appealingly homespun—version of the former. To open a social media feed is to be transported into a never-ending variety show of whirling dancers, bouncing puppies, jugglers, illusionists, muscular man-bun-sporting jocks heaving through weighted pull-ups, and long-lashed beauty experts dabbing unguents of glistening slime. Only a few rise, as distinct figures, from the algorithm’s wash and churn. Some find success in music or fitness or fashion; others, more mysteriously, in influencing as such. Almost none has done so as successfully as Caroline Calloway, whose dramatic misadventures—from conspicuous luxury at the University of Cambridge to a pandemic-era pivot to OnlyFans—have made her emblematic of the perils and compromises that accompany this form of cultural entrepreneurship.

In Calloway’s improbably brilliant memoir Scammer (2023), Actress and Influencer come face to face. Calloway meets Sweeney at a “chic party downtown.” “Sydney, when I told her my name, gazed sleepily at the flowers in my hair and said simply, ‘Obviously.’” It is a recognition scene, Calloway’s signature orchids crowning her hair like laurels. And despite Sweeney’s sleepy insouciance, we see that the old way of fame represented by Hollywood stardom can no longer ignore new insurgents. Influencers are, as the media scholar Sophie Bishop puts it, canaries in the algorithmic coal mine, the first to adapt to—and, in the process, discover—the rules that govern the digital sphere. These are rules that even celebrities now feel they must obey.

Actresses play characters; influencers play themselves. Are influencers vapid idlers famous for being famous? Or are they ensnared in a new, grueling, 24/7 form of performance, like actors trapped onstage? A recent wave of novels about influencers sides with the latter view. Influencing, in these novels, emerges as a kind of work so all-encompassing and insidious that it almost ceases to be legible as work at all. To adapt a famous distinction from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, influencing doesn’t resemble work (the creation of lasting artifacts) so much as labor—maintenance activities like cooking or washing, necessary for survival but ephemeral or transient in their effects, and which must be endlessly, exhaustingly, repeated.

That writers should be drawn to this desperate figure seems inevitable. As literature confronts its own crisis of cultural legitimacy, struggling to command attention in a despoiled media environment, the novel finds in social-media content not merely a subject to satirize, but a rival mode of cultural production from which it might learn a few tricks.

Hollywood haunts recent fiction about influencers as a mythic substrate. These novels turn to movie stars, Los Angeles, and various showbiz tropes to take the measure of a new and murkier kind of fame. The short stories in Sydney Rende’s I Could Be Famous (2026) circle around a frequently shirtless movie star named Arlo Banks. After rising to fame as a teenage heartthrob in a wholesome musical, Banks attempts a hyper-masculine rebrand with beefcake roles in movies like Hercules and Rodeo King (and, in the vein of buffed-up former Disney star Zac Efron, Baywatch). But his trajectory is derailed by a rumor that he may be a cannibal. The enigmatic model at the center of Tanya Grant’s Made You Look (2025)—a thriller about a group of influencers snowed in at a resort who start getting killed off one by one—is a horror actress, and it’s her acting, not her influencing, that’s pointedly invoked as a reason for the reader to distrust her. Allie Rowbottom’s feminist fairy tale Aesthetica (2022), one of the first artistically ambitious influencer novels, follows many showbiz narratives in sending a girl from the provinces to Los Angeles to become a star. That the heroine ends up posing for Instagram content for a cannabis company updates the template while affirming Hollywood’s primacy.

The true import of Arlo Banks’s alleged cannibalism is not its wink to Armie Hammer but its reflection of the influencer’s desire to be consumed by authentic fame, incorporated into the apparatus of the star system. Rende’s stories about aspirants to fame emphasize the influencer’s parasitic relation to established celebrity. The same point, however, could be made about influencer fiction itself. The reason why Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (2026) is described, in publicity copy, as “the most buzzed about novel of 2026” is that this satire about a tradwife who wakes up in the year 1855, forced to contend with the hardships of life on the prairie, is being adapted into a movie starring Anne Hathaway.

There clings to certain occupations, Adam Smith remarks in The Wealth of Nations, a “discredit,” as of “a sort of public prostitution.” His examples are actors, opera singers, and dancers, people whose work involves the passionate display of the body. (Such suspicion predates Protestant prudery; the Roman practice of infamia formalized this prejudice against bodily display by stripping legal rights from actors, gladiators, and sex workers.) We pay actors exorbitant salaries, Smith writes, to offset the potential shamefulness of performance.

The old star system did just that. Stars were intimate, available, but also insulated, turned into icons or gods. The influencer system, by contrast, maximizes vulnerability and exposure with no institutional protection and no guarantee of reward. We may not believe Sydney Sweeney when she says that she can’t “afford” to just act and that her brand deals with Miu Miu and Armani are driven by financial need (“They don’t pay actors like they used to”). But it is clear that something has broken, that influencing rushes in when other economic paths have failed. Influencer fiction’s hunger for Hollywood represents a fantasy about opportunities that are no longer available, nostalgia for life before our current regime of precarity, exposure, and cultural fragmentation.

Early influencer novels, like Aesthetica, tended to focus on the tyranny of beauty norms. The new spate of influencer fiction cares more about work, money, exhaustion, and failure. A profound disillusionment with labor permeates these novels, which imagine the influencer as a Band-Aid for a broken economy. When we meet Dell Danvers, the reckless heroine of Lior Torenberg’s Just Watch Me (2026), she is working at a smoothie shop in Grand Central Station. Her job is not so bad as far as service work goes. But she’s under constant surveillance, her boss watching her on the security cameras even when he’s on vacation in the Hamptons. A single bad online review from a disgruntled customer could cost her the job. After she hurls a jar of almond butter at a customer, Dell pivots to livestreaming, recording herself as she eats progressively hotter peppers, telling her viewers she’s raising money to keep her comatose sister on life support. And why not? She’s already being watched, already being evaluated online. “If anyone is going to exploit me, it’s me,” she says in one of the novel’s refrains.

Dell’s neighbor Lee, from whom she borrows food and money, has a cushy Zoom job as a data scientist (“whatever it is they do behind that closed door”) but which pays for an Equinox membership and organic vegetables while allowing Lee to smoke weed in the middle of the day. But Dell, an alienated college dropout who shoplifts at Whole Foods and jumps over subway turnstiles, is shut out of such sinecures. Disempowered in real life, in her livestream she crafts a dominatrix-y persona. She calls her stream her “dungeon” and berates her viewers into coughing up cash.

Natalie, the Harvard-educated tradwife antiheroine of Yesteryear, directs her cynicism not at service work but at a professional system dominated by men. After her college roommate Reena gets an internship at McKinsey, Natalie envisions the bleak future that awaits the career woman: eighty-hour workweeks “on a diet of cocaine and Red Bull,” escalating responsibilities, evaporating friendships, IVF treatments, a loveless marriage. Natalie’s alternative is that old Jeffersonian ideal, the family farm.

Agriculture is among the oldest and least contestable forms of labor, influencing among the newest and most suspect. Yesteryear interlaces these two forms of work. When Natalie, early in her trajectory as a tradwife influencer, tunes into a Zoom tutorial, she sees in the glowing squares her “direct competitors”: “Everyone had some kind of farm. Everyone was trying to sell their farm products directly to consumers online.” The only way to run a farm, in other words, is to have a successful influencer promoting it. The failure of the “real” work of farming is the condition out of which influencing emerges. Both Yesteryear and Just Watch Me echo Kim Kardashian’s line, “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” But the characters in these novels are desperate to work; they just can’t find dignified outlets for their labor.

The question of whether the influencer does “real work” is repeatedly raised by these novels, which frame influencing as both an escape from work and an intensification of it. Dell, in Just Watch Me, says early on, while streaming, “I’m kind of also at work right now.” Only after putting a hot pepper up her vagina does she affirm, “I’ve been working. . . . This isn’t a hobby.” Yesteryear elaborately conveys the strain of waking up each day to “face down an audience the size of a small nation.” Trying to become “likeable,” Natalie practices her smile in the mirror, “a drawing and quartering of the face.”

The uncertain status of the influencer’s labor is made audible when a right-wing talk show host boosts Natalie’s account: “Look at how hard this woman works. Look how exhausted and beautiful she is. This, my friends, is the true American dream. Not that hamster wheel nightmare out in the cities.” Natalie may have escaped the urban-professional hamster wheel, but she’s trapped on a treadmill of her own. Yesteryear, too, has a refrain: “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.”

Tanya Grant’s murder mystery Made You Look is, of these four new books, the most devoid of literary aspiration, but it conveys most clearly the ideologies governing the system it depicts. One influencer character spews grindset clichés. “Work is my life, and to maintain this lifestyle, I have to work,” she declares tautologically. “If I’m offline—being human, as you say—I’m missing out on visibility and exposure.” Influencing is a job where “you need to be working seven days a week.” She reflects: “I’ve spent too much time creating this life, working my ass off to climb to the top—of my career, of this industry.” That Grant places these clichés in the mouth of the villain would perhaps be subversive were it not for the fact that all the characters in Made You Look speak in clichés. This commercial thriller, more in touch with mass culture than the MFA productions of Burke, Rende, and Torenberg, announces the influencer’s new cultural function: that of exemplary worker.

So, what work do influencers do? They are performers who are always on call, demotic actors for a culture that has come to prefer commercials to cinema. Across these novels, influencers perform at least four kinds of labor. First, they guide consumption. A character in one of Rende’s stories, having spent twenty minutes hesitating over her brunch order, feels her doubts evaporate when her influencer-friend sits down: she’ll just have whatever the influencer is having. Influencers direct the circulation of money and desire in a symbolic economy that operates, in Rende’s words, by “assigning faces to things.” The influencer is a human overlay for commodities, a relation captured in Aesthetica by an image of the heroine’s face reflected in a shop window, “a small solitary girl projected over shoes, bags, lush swathes of leather and silk.” Sometimes the objects overwhelm the human entirely, as in a scene on a party bus in Made You Look in which “the suitcases threaten to roll down the aisle and crush” the influencers en route to their lethal Catskills getaway.

Second, and relatedly, they seduce us. The story in I Could Be Famous of a camgirl who asks for (and receives) a gift just before her client cums may offer a crude picture of the erotics of consumption, but in influencer fiction, the specter of sex work is always present. An aspiring actress, in another of Rende’s stories, shoots a commercial for padded underwear only to find her face later spliced into porn. The doomed muscle-boy influencer Jeff, in Made You Look, spends the portion of the novel while he’s still alive trying to hide his OnlyFans page from his girlfriend. Strikingly, all these books feature a powerful sapphic strain (made stunningly explicit in Made You Look and in Caroline Calloway’s raunchy memoir), a reminder that many influencers are women performing for other women.

Third, influencers preside over an alternative public sphere. Natalie’s father-in-law, in Yesteryear, is a right-wing presidential candidate, and Burke pointedly aligns Natalie, with her nation’s-worth of followers, and the John Wayne-esque senator. Like Natalie, he is trying to draw clicks and views. His face, before a speech, is “frozen in a joyless grin.” Influencers command followers, so they can address problems to which no political solution is forthcoming. In Just Watch Me and Made You Look, for example, influencing raises money for medical debt. Made You Look is particularly rigorous in its rejection of public remedies, offering a fuzzy view of influencers as prosocial, “connecting the right people to the right companies to make an impact.” Grant dedicates the book to “everyone who uses social media to make the world a better place, one post at a time.” The novel’s politics are clear: the state will not save you. Late in the thriller, when the lead influencer is in the process of being murdered, the drab heroine doesn’t call the police; she livestreams the stabbing in the hope that some followers will intervene.

Last and most crucially: influencers suffer on our behalf. As Dell, in Just Watch Me, prepares to eat a dangerously hot pepper for her fans, the equivalent of guzzling “pepper spray in front of a packed theater,” she thinks: “They came to see us suffer, not chitchat and idle on a lazy afternoon. They came to see real human pain.” In a domain of labor devoted less to production than to the circulation of money and commodities, pain reads as work because it recalls labor’s historical association with aversiveness. The work is the pain. If you’re not suffering, you’re not working. Thus in Yesteryear Natalie, on all fours in an inflatable pool, doing a home birth like a perfect tradwife, says through gritted teeth, “Get the camera. Film it.”

The new influencer fiction doesn’t just diagnose a crisis in work. It reflects a crisis in literature. That crisis is a deep uncertainty about how to respond to the attention economy. “In many ways,” Grant writes in the acknowledgements for Made You Look, “writing a book is no different” than “creating content.” If there remains a difference between literature and content, the influencer novel suggests how unstable that difference has become. In trying to depict influencers, these recent works of fiction drift away from interiority and toward contrived stunts that may win attention but feel cheap.

In Just Watch Me and I Could Be Famous, desperate quirk masquerades as originality. Actions are undermotivated or externally directed, as when Dell, in Just Watch Me, lights herself on fire after being prompted to do so by a follower with the username “literallyjustgod.” Torenberg’s spaghetti-at-the-wall approach is reflected in the novel’s sprawling symbolic system, which moves associatively from the plants crowding Dell’s windowless apartment to her comatose sister (a “vegetable”) to her fantasy of a seed growing in her brain to the hot peppers she eats and the fire she lights on her sleeve. I Could Be Famous is punctuated by similar acts of absurdity unmoored from psychology, as when Arlo Banks, the movie star, bites off a young woman’s fingernails, or when a lupus patient resolves to get her nipple pierced, or when a college student finds herself delivering the world’s longest blowjob. Interest is generated not through the exploration of character but by rigging up ridiculous stunts.

On the level of the sentence, banality frequently breaks in. In Just Watch Me we read of one character, “He’s chilled out, like a normal human.” We are treated to such digressions as, “Mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce, no matter where you order them, are fire. It’s impossible to mess up a mozzarella stick.” This is content-speak: relatable but vacant. As a character muses in I Could Be Famous: “It was stupid, but it was really something.”

In Made You Look, the luxury resort with its giant wall of glass where the influencers gather to be massacred seems perfect in every way. But the meditation room has no door. There’s no food in the kitchen except a small basket of sugary pastries. The dangerous publicity, annihilation of interiority, and lack of substance that define influencer culture are here spelled out.

Literature promises real nourishment, something more than spun sugar. But the latest influencer novels lose hold of that promise. Instead, they flail for attention. There is a reason why, in Scammer, Calloway says she had to “un-learn” Instagram in order to write. Yesteryear, the most intelligent and fully imagined of the new influencer novels, succeeds precisely because it resists mimicking the form it’s analyzing. The novel cuts between two timelines, the contemporary world and the world of 1855. In the contemporary timeline, Natalie is always false, always scheming. Immersed in her psychology, the reader is invited to see discrepancies between what she says and what she thinks. The pleasure here is of alliance with an antihero whose harsh inner monologue is often funny and perceptive. While the novel ultimately rejects the anti-urban, anti-modern chauvinism of the tradwife, Natalie’s arguments for her way of life are compellingly rendered.

The 1855 timeline, by contrast, forces the reader to sympathize with Natalie. Stranded in a hostile environment in a freezing house wearing rough clothing, placating a brutal husband, and hauling pails of raw milk streaked with cow shit, she seems normal, “like us.” In balancing these two planes of narration, Burke creates a memorable character who we come to know well. Natalie’s voice isn’t always consistent (her religiosity seems to come and go). And the novel’s attempt, at the end, to integrate the two timelines falters. But Yesteryear achieves a psychological persuasiveness the other novels lack.

Many writers have tried, in the last decade, to write a definitive internet novel. So far, no masterpiece has emerged. None of the novels reviewed here comes close. But the influencer novel—now a distinct subgenre and increasingly attentive to political economy—offers resources out of which something more could come. In the literature of our near future, the preservation of inner life in a culture of visibility and performance may come to seem not merely an aesthetic predilection but a condition of human survival—a final zone in which experience is not immediately staged, externalized, and put to work.