by Leigh Stein
Praise for Self Care
“Leigh Stein’s latest novel is as decadent and brutal as a vampire facial. It’s an exposé of feel-good feminism, an indictment of contemporary capitalism, and an absolute treat to read. This book will make you laugh, gasp, and vow to get off social media for good—and it’ll understand when you can’t help but log right back on.”
—Julia Phillips, author of National Book Award finalist Disappearing Earth
“Self Care is a skewering mockumentary about influencer culture, internet feminism, and the infinite ways that big tech capitalizes on our worst fears and insecurities. Utterly teeming with humor, this is exactly the sort of book that Dorothy Parker would have written if she’d been reincarnated as an Instagram celebrity.”
—Catherine Lacey, author of The Answers and Certain American States
“Wickedly talented Leigh Stein—for my money, one of our sharpest millennial writers—knows the internet, and she’s used that intimate knowledge to write a pitch-perfect novel for our times. Self Care is a hilarious and sneakily moving send-up of what it means to try and live when every move you make is observed and dissected online, by a writer who sees the truth and says it with so much humor and heart you’ll laugh (and maybe cry) out loud.”
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“A titillating satire about our quest for validation and the lengths that some will go to for #selfactualization, Self Care is an intelligent, delightful read that will make your mind (and epidermis!) glow.”
—Courtney Maum, author of Touch and Costalegre
“I couldn’t stop laughing. I loved it.”
—Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17
Praise for The Fallback Plan
“Beautiful, funny, thrilling, and true.”
—Gary Shteyngart
“Highbrow brilliant.”
—New York
“The Fallback Plan is to this generation what Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm was to a previous generation, and The Catcher in the Rye before that.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
PENGUIN BOOKS
Self Care
Leigh Stein is the author of the acclaimed 2012 novel The Fallback Plan, a poetry collection published the same year, and the 2016 memoir, Land of Enchantment. From 2014 to 2017, she ran a secret Facebook group of forty thousand women writers, in her role as cofounder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist nonprofit organization. She’s been called a “leading feminist” by The Washington Post and “poet laureate of The Bachelor” by The Cut.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2020 by Leigh Stein
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Stein, Leigh, 1984– author.
Title: Self care : a novel / Leigh Stein.
Description: New York City : Penguin Books, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019049527 (print) | LCCN 2019049528 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135197 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506867 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3619.T465 S45 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.T465 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049527
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049528
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Cover image: Shutterstock
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Praise for Leigh Stein
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
When’s the Last Time You Put Yourself First?
Maren
Devin
Maren
Khadijah
Maren
Devin
Maren
Devin
So You Want to Be a Foundress?
Khadijah
Khadijah
Devin
Maren
Devin
You Must Change Your Life
Maren
Khadijah
Devin
Maren
Acknowledgments
Woman lives her body as seen by another.
—Sandra Lee Bartky
If you think the internet is terrible now, just wait a while.
—Balk’s Third Law
When’s the Last Time You Put Yourself First?
Maren
By the time Devin found me, I’d been at the office for fourteen hours and was lying on a lavender velvet chaise, fortifying myself with room-temperature-staff-kitchen chardonnay that I’d poured into a “MALE TEARS” mug, scrolling through my various feeds, using multiple search terms, absorbing every abusive thing people were saying about me, @MarenGelb, M**en G**b, libtard, feminazi, stupid fucking cunt.
I wasn’t crying. I felt pleasantly numb. With an insatiable hunger for knowing, I kept compulsively refreshing, in search of the worst. The infinite scroll prevented me from ever hitting bottom.
The elevator ding signaled her arrival. “Babe?”
I raised my mug in the air.
“You’re here! People are worried about you. Your phone is off.”
“I turned it on Do Not Disturb so I could OD on the internet in peace.”
Devin tossed her coat over an ergonomic exercise ball chair. Her blond hair was still damp from showering after her exercise class, so I knew she wasn’t too concerned about me, not so concerned that she’d miss an opportunity to burn six hundred calories. She was wearing her “Namaslay” T-shirt.
After a bottle of wine, I’d ditched my sweater and was down to my BreastNest, a garment I’d ordered online. It’s a spongy beige sack you can wear for support if even the idea of clasping a bra is too much.
“Sit next to me,” I said. “You smell good.”
“What are you drinking?”
“Kombucha,” I said.
I’d been working late, revising the competitive advantage slide for our pitch deck. Everyone else had gone home. The song of my inbox played at a slower tempo after dark—it was the only time of day I could get anything done. I took a break to check Twitter, and without asking anyone’s permission or doing a SWOT analysis, I made a joke. Or I thought it was a joke. Definitely an anger-based joke, I can admit that now. It seemed more obviously funny at the time.
“What if you just deleted the tweet?” she said.
“Too late. They already showed it on Anderson Cooper.”
I played the clip for her on my phone. Leading feminist Maren Gelb is causing waves tonight with what some on the right are calling a dog whistle to other activists about the president’s daughter and her—I had to turn it off. I couldn’t watch it again.
“Don’t worry,” Devin said. “No one watches Anderson Cooper.”
“I watch Anderson Cooper.”
“Well, you’re my elder.” Devin smiled and the highlighter around her eyes shimmered with optimism. “Give me the phone, Maren.”
“Why, what are you going to do with it?”
“I’m just going to babysit it while you clean up.”
“Wait,” I snapped. My left hand was a claw that had evolved to grip this little screen until I died. “Can I show you just one?” We both knew I was stalling. “Look at this douche in Palo Alto with half a million followers, saying, ‘@MarenGelb is an example of the leadership principal when they go low, we go lower. Did I get that right? Hashtag AllLivesMatter.’ He doesn’t even know how to spell principle! ‘All Lives Matter’? Seriously? Do you see this?”
Devin put my phone in her back pocket without even looking at the screen. I needed another drink.
“Well,” I said, “the good news is I figured out what our competitive advantage is.”
“Let me guess. Our badass cofounders?” She pointed at me and made her hands into a heart.
“No.”
“Wait, don’t tell me. Our seamless integration of sponsored content and organically sourced influencers?”
“No,” I said. “The worse it gets—I mean the more women who are outraged and terrified and suffering—the more our user base grows. The more the network scales.”
It was happening right now. A hundred new members a minute. The more I was attacked by right-wing trolls, the more women on the left rallied to support me. I was smart enough to retweet all the rape threats (mostly in the “too ugly to rape” genre) I was getting and ask women to create accounts at Richual, the social network Devin and I had built as a world without men—where women could actually take care of themselves.
Richual asked: when’s the last time you put yourself first? Our app pressed a pause button on all the bullshit in daily life. You could track your meditation minutes and ounces of water consumed and REM sleep and macros and upcoming Mercury retrogrades and see who among your friends was best at prioritizing #metime, based on how many hours a day they spent on the app. It was a virtual space where @SmokyMountainHeartOpener posted videos of herself doing forearm stands in a thong leotard and @PussyGrabsBack shared photos of her feet soaking in Epsom salt after a march.
It was the digital sanctuary where you went to unload your pain.
We earned revenue from the brands who offered solutions to that pain: serums and creams, juices and dusts, clays and scrubs, drugs and masks, oils and enemas, scraping and purging, vaping and waxing, lifting and lengthening, straightening and defining, detox and retox, the cycle of life.
Devin was the face of Richual. She was also the body. She was literally the “after” photo in a piece of branded content promoting a thirty-day cleanse. T-shirt slogans popped on her flat chest. Her collarbone was usually exposed and opalescent. She was small enough that she appeared appropriately human-size in photographs taken at red carpet launches, while I stood to one side like her zaftig cousin visiting from another country—the country of Wisconsin.
Devin hid the work it took to make that body. I wore my work like a second, visible skin. Over the course of eighteen months, I’d gone from a size 8 to a 14 and upped my Zoloft prescription twice. My thighs rubbed together when I walked in a dress. The internet told me this was normal. The internet showed me ads for nontoxic anti-chafing gel.
No one ever called us by the other’s name.
Devin went to the beauty closet and came back with a tube of Missha Super Aqua Cell Renew Snail Sleeping Mask with 15 percent snail slime extract “from healthy snails born within five to six months” for “strengthening the skin barrier in a natural way.”
“Try this and we’ll take a selfie and I’ll post it to my account so everyone knows you’re okay,” Devin said. She picked my wrinkled sweater off the floor and I held my arms up like a toddler, so she could dress me.
“The tweet is gonna be good for us, you’ll see,” I said. “Don’t worry about the tweet.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 24, 2017
RICHUAL CEO DEVIN AVERY WISHES COO MAREN GELB “GOOD VIBES” FOR HER RECOVERY
Maren Gelb deeply regrets the violent language she posted on Twitter yesterday in regards to a family member of POTUS. Her tweet does not in any way reflect the values of Richual, the most inclusive community platform for women to cultivate the practice of self-care and change the world by changing ourselves. CEO Devin Avery assures the Richual community that Maren’s joke was meant to be perceived as “dark humor,” like “Melissa McCarthy,” and not as a threat to the health or safety of the first daughter.
“Maren is the most selfless, empathic person I know,” Avery says. “I could not have done this without her as my work wife, and I’m sending so many good vibes her way.”
In the words of one of our faves, Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare,” but “warfare” is up to each person to decide for herself, and at Richual, we believe that all people are human beings. We trust the community will join us in support of Maren, while she realigns her spirit and health with our core values of respite, recalibration, and resilience. #Namaste
About Us: Richual is a pioneer in the wellness space, using social technology to connect, cure, and catalyze women to be global changemakers through the simple act of self-care.
Devin
Women are people.
All people are human beings.
Believe women.
Do better.
Self-care is not selfish.
Don’t read the comments.
You are more than a digital footprint.
The political is personal.
Stay woke.
Calm the fuck down.
With a single tweet, Maren had broken at least two of Richual’s Ten Commandments stenciled in fuchsia and sherbet on the wall by reception. How could she say she believed women when she didn’t believe that having a woman who could advocate for better family leave policies to her dad was a good thing for women? A girl I knew in college was now doing marketing for a startup using nanotechnology to build air filters that eradicate mold toxicity on the molecular level and the guy who had the job before her had a younger brother (adopted) who once dated Tiffany and that was how I was able to get a meeting with someone on Ivanka’s team about inviting her to join our exclusive sorority of Richual influencers, after it came to me in a dream one night, the kind of high-quality native content related to juggling entrepreneurship, motherhood, politics, and gardening she could put out there as @Fir$tDaughter, but Maren flushed that potential partnership down the toilet.
When I asked her to at least explain the tweet to me, why she thought it was funny, she just sent me a link to an article about “punching up” in comedy and said, “Educate yourself.”
I wasn’t mad, not after I did my rounds of kapalabhati this morning, but I was concerned. Maren practiced the least amount of self-care of anyone I knew. Imagine if the COO of Sweetgreen ate McDonald’s for lunch every day. You’d be like, Wut?
I’d seen Maren like this before. When I met her at a retreat for solopreneurs in New Orleans, she was in a very dark place. You could tell she was one of the scholarship recipients by how I found her during the continental breakfast wrapping mini muffins in paper napkins to save in her purse for lunch. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t really a purse so much as it was a “Free Pussy Riot” tote bag. “I want to mentor that one,” I told the organizers. She was working for a charity and had come to the retreat to learn entrepreneurship so she could get better at fundraising. I wanted to do a full makeover, starting with the food types that suited her dosha, but when she showed me the charity website, we had to start there.
“Honestly? You need to invest in a redesign,” I told her. “You only have one chance to make a first impression on me and this is not
mobile-friendly. I can’t share this link with my friends and ask them to donate if it’s not cute, you know?”
Maren put her head in her hands. I could tell I was breaking through to her by the way she was breaking down. “You want to make money, don’t you?” I asked. She nodded her head without looking at me. “Like, a lot of money, right?” Another nod.
Overnight, she redesigned the website herself, so that it was more pink overall and the Donate Now button stood out in mint green, the color of money, not in an aggressive way but in a way that made you feel generous, like you were building Barbie’s Dreamhouse for women who were less fortunate than you.
No matter what I suggested Maren do—including actually ask herself if she wanted to be leading a nonprofit where everyone took her for granted—she did it. We roleplayed different scenarios where she would find herself one-on-one with a woman with a high net worth. I told her the secret to asking for money was to never actually mention money at all.
“Pretend I’m seventy-eight, I’m a widow, my name is Frances but all my friends call me Fifi, and I have a bichon frise on my lap.
“Pretend I’m the young heiress to an alcoholic beverage distributor fortune and I grew up in a household that values philanthropy and you happen to run into me at SoulCycle in East Hampton.
“Pretend my family built their wealth doing something very bad for the environment or something and I feel very, very guilty, and you can help me feel better.”
Finally, I said, “Before she died, my mom started a small foundation that gives art grants in New York City. I know she would have been interested in the work you’re doing and I’d like to donate five thousand dollars.”
“Is this part of the roleplay?”
“No! I’m being serious.”
Maren’s nose turned bright red and then she started to cry. I’d never seen someone so genuinely grateful about so little money. It was super satisfying, like when you’re trying to get the last glob of jelly cleanser from a tube and you’re shaking and shaking it upside down and it squirts out all at once. I wondered what it would be like to collaborate on something, if I could find us some funding. Maren could resign from her pointless job and we could do work that actually made a difference—at scale.