There is an influencer on Instagram my hairdresser told me about three years ago when I started seeing her. She mentioned the influencer—let’s call her Heather—in passing, using her as one example in a collection of what she referred to as “extreme people,” and I pulled out my phone and looked. She was tiny and fit and never wearing anything other than lingerie and her posts veered toward Instagram poetry without ever quite getting there. A naked girlboss, lounging in an exposed-brick studio apartment.
“Great hair though,” I said. “Oh, that’s all extensions,” she said with a laugh.
I was instantly transfixed by Heather. Not because she was interesting, but because she was so convinced of her own non-averageness. She is CERTAIN that she is remarkable, that she is Doing Something Important, something other than enriching Zuck and the Kardashians by constantly posting image sets in her SKIMS. Every image of her so violently contradicts each caption beneath it, and for a while I thought there was no way she could be serious, like maybe she was doing an elaborate bit about influencer culture or feminism or art. But she never flinches, never blinks. She is serious about influencing. She believes in it. The cognitive dissonance seemed like it had to be too much for her tiny body, like someday her molecules would simply fly apart into the ether and she would influence no more.
But it never happened. Instead it got more and more extreme, the images and the captions diverging to the point of hilarious absurdity, to the point where I was taking screenshots almost daily to send to the friend I had cursed with knowledge of Heather’s existence so that we could dissect her in our chats. I began to loathe her and her seemingly deliberate contradictions, the way people in her comments showered her with admiration, the way she openly shit on other influencers for doing the exact same nonsense she was doing, the way she projected an image of ostentatious wealth while having actually not that much engagement all things considered and my friend and I started to wonder: was she faking it? Did she actually BUY the things she was wearing and PRETEND to be doing ads for those companies? Was she hoping that if she did it for long enough this would actually manifest as a lifestyle for her? I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
It made me furious, the way she posted, as though pivoting to orthorexia and posing semi-nude on the High Line made any kind of statement about anything the way she seemed to so fervently believe it did. I was even more furious when she’d post about books, only ever seeming to read the mid-century misogynists, stacking them proudly around her bath tub or around her dinner spread, and then preaching about feminism and art. I was furious that she was traveling and partying during the pandemic. I was furious at her every time I fucking looked at her, but I just! kept! looking!
I hated her.
But still, it seemed harmless. I figured everyone has one of these people on their feeds, who cares, right?
And then one day, she posted a video from the building I used to live in in Manhattan. I knew it because we were a somewhat uniquely positioned building, situated right on the Hudson River, looming over the The Intrepid, the only building with that particular view. My apartment was on the other side of the building from that view, so I ran to the elevator and up to the roof lounge. It had a deck that went all the way around the building, so from there I could take a photo with a similar perspective to the one she’d posted, the same angles, in order to compare. I sent them to my friends and said: these are the same view, right?? Everyone agreed.
But then I looked again, just wanting to see if I could get a better screen grab of the video. And it had been deleted. Less than two hours after it had been posted.
A mystery.
This is where I fell off the fucking cliff. Sure, part of it was lockdown—what the fuck else did I have to obsess over? I was lonely, everything was boring, even drinking. Heather being in my building was like someone put some cheese at the end of the maze I was trapped in. Now I had a destination.
I was checking her multiple times a day then, screaming like a teenager at the few posts I recognized as coming from inside my building as they blinked in and out of existence. Why was she posting just to delete? She didn’t do this with any other content. I noticed that the posts from my building tended to happen in the mornings, like she’d stayed in my building overnight maybe. She’d post them, delete them, and then resume posting from inside her apartment. And so I would open my eyes in the morning with my hand already reaching for my phone to see if Heather had been here secretly in the night, creeping around like a toxic boring Santa Claus.
I became convinced I would see Heather, in my building where she was clearly hanging out *in secret*. I started aiming my thrice weekly walks at where I knew she lived in town, casually passing the gym I knew she went to seven days per week, sometimes twice a day. I looked around corners every time I walked my dog, certain that she was here, lurking just out of vision. I felt it in my bones that I was destined to run across her, and that when it happened I would laugh so hard people would think I had cracked right there in the elevator or on the sidewalk.
But it never happened.
Instead, I moved to the Hudson Valley and it was like a spell was broken. I went from checking on her every time I opened that accursed app, to checking twice a week, to forgetting about her for weeks at a time. Then one day, I went to her grid and saw she was posting about attending *and enjoying* a Joe Rogan show, and I thought: Jesus christ what am I doing. Who am I.
And I have not checked on her since.
(Ok I‘m lying: I checked ONCE while reading about the scourge of rats that is currently terrorizing New York City because I wanted to send my friend a “shot/chaser” photo of the rats headline and then a photo of Heather in lingerie in the park. I wish her no specific harm, I swear, I just … look, this isn’t important. Just forget it.)
Heather was on my mind when I picked up Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt from Rough Draft Bar & Books last month. I thought about her all through the book, in fact. Because it is a book about watching to the point of obsession, to the point of the abstract suddenly becoming very, very real. I’m interested in how what started with idle curiosity about an Extreme Person began to warp into morbid fascination and then into something darker, grotesque. How quickly it devolved into constant nitpicking and eventually loathing. It’s terrifying how intensely we can feel for someone—how much we can project onto them—even if we don’t know them at all.
The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a novel told from the perspective of The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. She notices The Woman in the Purple Skirt at the park, the way she interacts with the kids playing nearby, the things she orders from the nearby bakery. As The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan describes the mundanities of the other woman’s life, Imamura is busy spinning dread like hot sugar. The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan seems lonely, strange, trapped. She wants to become friends with The Woman in the Purple Skirt, but you know it’s more than that. You know it instantly, because you can feel it in the hair on the back of your neck.
The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan gets The Woman in the Purple Skirt a job at the hotel where she works, thinking that this will be when they finally form a friendship. But instead, things continue apace: The Woman in the Purple Skirt makes easy friends with the other housekeepers, and The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan remains apart, watching, noticing, dissecting. Lonely, strange, always there.
The thing is: The Woman in the Purple Skirt isn’t actually very interesting as a person (neither is Heather and I cannot emphasize that enough). But The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan can’t look away. She listens to her conversations, notes what she buys, what shampoo she uses. She waits outside her apartment to see what she does on her off days, she follows her on dates. And as you watch her watching, you grow gradually more uneasy, more certain that this is careening toward disaster.
There is a moment when you think the spell might break, when you think maybe this is The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan’s Joe Rogan moment. Instead, it’s the moment where you realize just how far The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan’s life has deteriorated, that what is left for her is only detritus of her old lonely, bored and boring self because the rest of it has long-since dissolved like cotton candy in the tiny hands of a meticulous raccoon.
Because you can’t pay that much attention to another person without losing yourself.
Imamura is deadpan without hitting you over the head. Taught and menacing, but intimate and everyday, a tiny book without a single wasted word. I read it in one bite, and you will too. Here’s an excerpt.
Buy The Woman in the Purple Skirt at this link.
Listening: This album of trippy Madonna covers from Italians Do it Better
Reading: Summer Brennan’s (not entirely unrelated to this whole post) breakdown of Bad Art Friend. It’s worth it, trust me. Here’s part 1.
Fairy Tale: Please enjoy the worst love story of all time accompanied by the best illustrations of all time
Best Costume: goes to the fart kid and it’s not even close
Cooking: I had a cheese danish so offensive that I became determined to make my own AND SO I DID THAT here’s the recipe I started with, it’s pretty easy actually if you spent the last year making hundreds of pie crusts 🥴
Drinking: lookit this cute little place that opened near me! ! they do canned cocktails using local ingredients and they are called LIQUID FABLES because each can has!! a story!!!! on it!!!!! and the best part is that they use real liquor, not just vodka 👀