Book Review: Fan Club | Erin Mayer

This book has taken me over a month to review but I know it was impactful because I’m honestly still thinking about it. The writing and narrative style is not similar to anything I’ve read, and I often felt like I was in a fever dream while reading it, but I also couldn’t put it down. Unique, twisted, and with an interesting social commentary!

About the Book

In this raucous psychological thriller, a millennial office worker finds relief from her crippling ennui in the embrace of a cliquey fan club, until she discovers the group of women is bound together by something darker than devotion.

Day after day our narrator, a gloomy millennial, searches for meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women’s lifestyle website—entering text into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she hears a message in the newest single by child-actor-turned-international-pop-star Adriana Argento, and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community whose members feverishly track Adriana’s every move.

When a colleague notices the extent of her obsession, she’s invited to join an enigmatic group of adult Adriana superfans who call themselves the Ivies and worship her music in witchy, candlelit listening parties. As the narrator becomes more entrenched in the group, she gets closer to uncovering the sinister secrets that bind them together—while simultaneously losing her grip on reality.

With caustic wit and hypnotic writing, this unsparingly critical thrill ride through millennial life examines all that is wrong in our celebrity-obsessed internet age, and how easy it is to lose yourself in it.

Review

At it’s core, it is an interesting commentary on not just fan culture, but how many of us seek to find a sense of belonging and identity through engagement with others. And while it is nothing new, this book excellently portrays the stark contrast between what is on social media and someone’s true life and self.

Narrated largely by a nameless young millennial office worker (though I’d argue depending on what year this is deemed to take place, she might actually be gen z due to her age), the book opens with the soul crushing monotony of our narrator’s job at a women’s lifestyle website. She arrives at work, spends her day reformatting, prepping, testing, and launching content designed by the other more important writers and editors at her office. She barely speaks to anyone out loud all day—that is the office culture.

Her main joy during the day (if you can even call it that) is her four scheduled coffee breaks where she makes a hazelnut Keurig coffee, fills her cat mug, and takes it to the restroom to stand in the pink handicap stall for 15 minutes and looks at a piece of graffiti while she searches for some sense of purpose in her life.

She has a best friend but frankly they seem to have nothing in common other than growing up together. Her friend is in publishing and has seen career and relationship success, but she doesn’t feel like a real person. Similar to the celebrity our narrator will soon become obsessed with, her best friend feels like a shell of who she actually is—carefully crafted like an Instagram page to project a certain life she aspires to have.

Sometimes after work our narrator goes out with the other low-ranking team members who perform her same role. One night she has too much to drink and makes out with one of her coworkers who is married and keeps a photo of his wife at his desk. A song playing over the speaker soon pulls her out of the moment, and she flees the bar to go home.

The song is by Adrianna Argento, a young, beautiful pop star in a famous couple with another celebrity. Our narrator slowly becomes obsessed with Adrianna’s music, listening to it most of the day and night while she continues to push through the monotony of her life. While initially embarrassed to let anyone know she is a fan of Adrianna, she soon meets a new co-worker who gets it, and invites her to get together with a group of friends and fellow Adrianna fans.

This is when the book really takes off. I don’t want to say too much, other than that from the moment the narrator joins the fan group, she feels a strong desire to be accepted, while also seeming to understand that something is off about the other women. For starters, they have a very cultlike feel to the group, and there is a clear leader. They also seem to love Adrianna but are simultaneously hyper critical of much of what she does.

For instance, our narrator became a fan of Adrianna because of the song she heard on the dance floor that night. But she soon learns this group of fans hates all of Adrianna’s new music. The group is obsessed with Adrianna, but they also feel entitled to have her life and career go the way they want it to. They seem to adore her and hate her at the same time. Their behavior often implies that they like the idea of Adrianna more than the person and the artist.

As things get weirder with the fan club, the author also starts pulling bits of Adrianna’s story into the narrative, narrated by Adrianna herself. These were perhaps the most compelling chapters, as the contrast between who Adrianna really is and what the fan club thinks she is becomes more apparent.

I won’t say where the book heads because I think part of the fun is going along for the ride. The book becomes increasingly disorienting as you read it, and this is in part because the author has so masterfully set the tone early of a mind-numbing nameless person drifting through life with almost no connection to the physical world surrounding her.

I have to say that the ending is so deeply compelling and shocking. I have spent weeks thinking back on the book itself and reflecting on the message it sends to the reader.

If you are looking for something new and different, this is it!