Self Care: A Novel

"To be honest, I grew up working-class in Cupertino. Both my parents worked, like, a lot. My dad is an anesthesiologist and my mom is an econ professor at Stanford. When I tell people I'm from Cupertino, they assume I grew up immersed in tech and startup culture, but I really had zero exposure. Everything I've built, I built it myself."

This is a send up of internet social media. Maren and Devin are friends who started a website together, a social media site focusing on women taking care of themselves. Richual, "the most inclusive community platform for women to cultivate the practice of self-care and change the world by changing ourselves," is just as terrible as it sounds. Maren and Devin are scrambling to pull together financing, show more although Devin leaves plenty of room for the expensive self-care required for her image and Maren is scrambling because she has plenty of student debt and the nominal pay until the site becomes profitable is not enough to support her and her not entirely hardworking boyfriend. Then there's Khadijah, the sole Black employee who is always positioned front and center of any publicity pictures, and who single-handedly writes most of the content, who is trying to keep this job going now that she's pregnant and her partner plans to become a house-husband.

Doug was like fifteen or twenty years older than Evan and I, old enough to have bought a Nirvana CD back when that was the only way to hear music, but not old enough to be our dad.

This novel is ridiculous, but never unbelievable. Richual allows women to compete over how much self-care they engage in along with the idea that self-care is work every bit as important as social activism. None of the characters are laudable or even that nuanced, but somehow Stein gets the reader to care about all of the women, no matter how shallow and no matter how little they learn along the way. If you're even glancingly familiar with millennial/gen Z internet culture, this novel will feel all to close to reality and if you're not, I'm not sure what you'll make of it. show less

The idea for this book is golden: a satirical novel and scathing critique of the self-care womens empowerment wellness industry. I enjoyed it and it was a quick, easy and entertaining read that also makes you think. The ending was solid - especially the final quote.

“But I also knew the music was going to get louder and louder until it sheltered us, a room full of women willing to do anything to our bodies if it drowned out the sound of our minds, each of us screaming for our own reasons, in the dark.”

But the writing left a lot - a whole lot - to be desired. So many cliches, which I suppose were intentional part of the satire, but they too often were so obvious they fell flat. Perhaps in part because the novel is so short, the show more characters and their relationships to each other (especially Devin and Maren) were severely underdeveloped. I was never convinced that Devin and Maren could be friends, or could even like each other. Their relationship still makes no sense to me. Also, some of the plot lines seemed to just go unresolved. Still - the satire itself is entertaining and needed, and I did enjoy the book.

Content warning: sexual abuse, racist microaggressions show less

This book so perfectly encapsulates everything I hate about our social media and brand obsessed culture that I literally can't even read it. DNF around page 50. It's not the book, it's just me.