Even though ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF is not a long book, it took me several months to finish because the subject matter was so heavy. Not that I'm surprised-- this is the same author who wrote SOMEDAY, MAYBE, an ugly and raw portrayal of the isolating and destructive power of grief. I was more than expecting this book to hit well below the emotional belt... which it DOES, by the way.
Anuri is a British-Nigerian woman struggling with alcohol addiction and femdomming her loyal army of simpering paypigs on OF while also running her booming scented candle business. But she's also the stepdaughter of a successful white parenting influencer named Ophelia, who posted every single one of her most humiliating and vulnerable moments online for clicks. When she became a teenager, she'd had enough and began to push back, and then Ophelia and her father had a second daughter, Noelle, who replaced Anuri.
Anuri, watching and stalking her stepmother through screens, is seeing the same destructive patterns happen to her half-sister. And this, and the fact that her past is publicly accessible, drive her to sue Ophelia, to force her to wipe her content off the internet forever and finally bring herself peace. But Ophelia didn't get to where she was by submitting to pressure, and she's willing to fight dirty to stay in the spotlight.
This is honestly such a timely read, because the first wave of parenting influencers' kids are starting to come of age and I think it's pretty clear that their lives were not nearly as rosy as their mothers pretended. Anyone who has complained about the ethics of parent influencing is going to feel vindicated by this book because it explores literally all the horrors: the bullying from peers, the lasting emotional damage, the conflict of interest when a child's best interests prevent loss of income to the home, and, of course, how putting children online also puts them into proximity to predators and other dangerous people.
Ophelia's whiteness adds another layer of ick to the situation because she uses her Black husband and Black daughters in a way that essentially commodifies their Blackness and their bodies, in an attempt to gain credibility and access to spheres where she really doesn't belong. By the end of the book, it's interesting to examine her as a character when all of the layers have been peeled away, because her corrosive style of influencing basically ate away at everything that really made her her, until all that was left behind were her own unresolved traumas.
ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF is not an easy read but I still liked it a lot. The characters felt like real people and I think that was part of what made it so difficult to read; it was hard to remember that I wasn't actually watching real people screw up their lives. My only qualm with the book is that I think in an effort to portray Anuri as multi-faceted, there was too much time spent on her with her friends in scenes that could feel repetitive, which did bog down the pacing. But for the most part, I think having these connections were integral in showing how Anuri was bolstered by her "village" to finally take a stand against a toxic and narcissistic parenting figure who was allowed to wield far too much power.
I can't wait to see what else this author writes. She seems to be getting better with every book and I love that for her and for me.
4 stars
One of my friends has been trying to get me to read Elizabeth Stephens for the longest time and after reading THE BONE KING AND THE STARLING, I clearly need to snap up her backlist because this book was soooo good. It reminded me a lot of a more violent and explicit version of Elizabeth Vaughan's WARPRIZE, with heavy dashes of a non-rapey Khal Drogo, set in an alternate Norse fantasy kingdom where mammoths roam across the ice.
