People LIke Her(18)
Round and round the conversation will go, one of us self-accusing, the other trying to reassure them, to justify what we’re doing, both of us pointing out the flaws in each other’s arguments, both of us wrestling with ourselves as much as each other but still quick to pick up on the other’s turn of phrase or tone of voice, both of us getting tenser and tenser, the air in the room steadily thickening. And what it will come down to, after all’s said and done, the horrible truth, the bottom line, the limiting factor in all our discussions, nutters or no nutters, qualms and quibbles or no qualms and quibbles, is this: that if we pull the plug now there’s no way we can pay the bills.
Emmy
I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
Irene and I did sit down and have a long conversation before I signed with her about what being an influencer involves. I showed her my own personal Instagram account—emmyjackson, 232 followers, all of whom I’d met in real life, whose surnames I knew—and she used it as a show-and-tell to explain why my badly lit photos of brunch, the occasional bouquet or cupcake, unphotogenic friends and bathroom selfies with my cheeks sucked in, would not cut it. To turn this into a career, I’d need precision-planned hashtags, content streams and topical themes, fellow influencer friends I could tag and who would tag me back, photos shot weeks in advance and edited to perfection (or, as it turned out, imperfection).
She made it sound a lot like Mamabare would be similar to editing my own little magazine, each Instagram post a new page. In a way it was, back then. Followers would comment with hearts and winks. Nobody seemed to realize they could send me private messages, or if they did, they never bothered. Twitter was for sniping and snark; Instagram was a friendly space for pretty pictures and smiley faces.
The shift was imperceptible at first. Slowly, the comments stopped being total love-ins. Direct messages started to trickle in, at first mainly from happy mamas high on oxytocin during four a.m. feeds. But they soon became a torrent, all expecting an immediate response whether they were telling me I should be ashamed of myself for selling my family online or that they liked my lipstick. Gossip sites launched. Tabloids started to report on our spats and slipups as if we were genuine celebrities.
Dan and I used to be the couple who were so in demand that we had to turn down dinner parties because our calendars were too tightly packed—the hot fashion girl and the up-and-coming author who you simply must meet. We would arrive looking like we might have just had sex (we usually had), with two bottles of well-chosen wine, deliver each other’s punch lines all night, be first on the dance floor at the kitchen disco and then the last to leave. But we stopped going to those dinner parties long ago, knowing that I’d inevitably have my phone out by the time the second bottle of wine was opened, trying to keep on top of my messages and comments. Come to think of it, perhaps we just stopped being invited.
Eventually, Instagram felt less like editing my own personal magazine and more like hosting a daily talk radio show where a thousand listeners get to call in every episode and are allowed airtime no matter how vicious or incoherent they are. Overnight, instead of lovely little snapshots in discreet little squares, thanks to Instastories—those fifteen-second videos that gobble up our lives—now it feels like I have a GoPro strapped to my head at all times of the day and night. I can barely take a wee without feeling the need to beam the fact out for public consumption.
I sometimes look back at the private emmyjackson profile I never deleted, with those ninety-seven unplanned posts, preserved in internet aspic, and I barely recognize myself. I scroll through photos that show Emmy grinning over avocado toast, hugging Polly on a picnic blanket in the park, standing under the Eiffel Tower with Dan, or drinking shots on her wedding day, and I feel a little bit jealous of her.
Who could have predicted how big, how life-altering Instagram would become? One hundred million images uploaded a day, they say. One billion users. It boggles the mind.
Still, I’m not some ingenue who just stumbled into influencing for a living. Dan knew what we were getting into as well. We did discuss all this before Mamabare was born, but it does strike me sometimes that when he agreed I should give it a go, neither one of us really anticipated how quickly it would take off or how famous it would make us, as a family, or how exposing that would feel.
He gave himself a real scare yesterday.
I have told Dan, I have warned him, so many times, that you can’t take your eyes off Coco for a second. It’s one of the reasons why I’m paranoid about letting Dan’s mum look after her: the thought that in the time it takes her to open her handbag and get a tissue for Coco’s snotty nose, our daughter might go from riding her bike along the pavement to riding it under the wheels of a truck. And on top of the usual things that could happen to an unsupervised three-year-old—sticking a fork in an uncovered socket, say, or choking on the fifty-pence piece they inexplicably decided to suck on—there are also more than a million people out there, not all of them nice, who know Coco’s face, her name, her age, her favorite food, her favorite TV program.
Of course, Dan being Dan, he was so self-flagellating about the whole Westfield thing—so dramatic about what might have happened, so emphatic about how terrible he felt—that losing my temper and shouting was not an option. And so I just had to swallow whatever irritation or anger or fear I might have been feeling about all those panicky missed calls, about having had to cancel the meeting with my agent, about not being able to leave my husband in charge of either one of our children for three fucking minutes. Instead, I found myself rubbing his shoulder, telling him it was really not such a big deal, that it could have happened whoever was watching her.