Excerpted from I’m A Fan, forthcoming from Graywolf

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I live in the world of mass consumerism, picking out kitchenware and furniture from Ikea, pining for jewellery from Argos and showing off fast fashion from the high street. One size fits all is the perfect size for me. My race blots out my individuality quite neatly. I am in the world of identical goods with in-built obsolescence. The woman I am obsessed with will only ever be an individual, the uniformity with which mass consumerism and race engulfs me does not touch her universe. Her regenerative organic food is grown to a level of purity by which she can sneer at the quality in Whole Foods. Her food is grown by farmers she knows by first name and arranged in beautiful, handmade, one-off pottery. Her food can be traced back to the seed, whereas mine is bought through a complex line of anonymised, automated, industrialist networks. Every object she owns is of heirloom quality, made by one person and has an individual personality. They often come from makers who have disclaimers like due to the handmade nature of these items some of them will differentiate in tone, or texture or colour, but we think it adds to their specialness. Sometimes the makers are dead so immediately the object becomes more special in her care, or they are sourced from antique shops off dirt tracks from abroad. As the child of a famous person, this feeling of being a rare kind of human being born of a rare kind of human being, from a uniquely wrought household is underlined by the objects she surrounds herself with. Even the books she reads are first editions or out of print, sourced from ramshackle bookshops in out of the way places from cities all over the world. The unattainability of what she chooses to surround herself with seemingly rubs off on her, they further allude to qualities she has that are innately hers by birthright and it creates a kind of frenzy around her from others. The woman I am obsessed with captions her food as ‘pure,’ ‘perfect’ and ‘best.’ Only this standard of quality will do. She presents nettle-infused risotto in saucepans called donabe which I have to google ($500 from an ‘authentic’ Japanese vendor), wild flowers she buys from her local farmers market are presented in handmade designer jugs shipped over from her half-sister in ‘England’ (she says England in this very deliberate way, not mongrel ‘Britain’ or the ‘UK’, but England as if she has extracted the native character of the country that is mine). Her food has individual character, she anthropomorphises her pink lettuce captioning the photo with ‘this gorgeous beauty is coming home with me’ as if even her food has to look devastatingly alluring, has to have some remarkable individual quality to it before she deigns to bring it home with her. In an interview, she says she spent almost $100 on eight heritage apples and it is obvious she was unaware of the problematic nature of admitting this, which implies she doesn’t know the value of money divided by industrial bodily labour and time. She posts very simple recipes and people write comments like ‘doing this now’, ‘thanks for the idea’, ‘where did you get that beautiful pot’, ‘this is the recipe of the year’. Under her photos, people will write ‘you have such a wonderful sensibility for arranging still life, utilizing natural light and framing photographs’, and I think, if the only thing I had to do all day was take a photo of what I bought at a farmer’s market then my photos would be a still life too. Hatescrolling her Instagram unleashes something corrosive in me. I sneer as I read through the sometimes hundreds of comments she gets, the adulation, how carefully she is spoken to, my mouth gets used to the shape it makes when reading them, relishes it even. She surreptitiously deletes anyone who questions her cultural appropriation of her espousing other cultures like it’s her own but because I am often first to her posts or stories, I see them and then because I revisit her profile so often, I notice them disappear. When I see this, I crow with glee at her inability to bear being criticised. To my delight she poses awkwardly in her selfies. She has a smile frozen to her face and the whites of her eyes are too exposed giving her a frightened look, her hair is flipped to one side often using a filter, always preferring her left side. She tags where she buys her clothes, a balloon-sleeved peasant top with a wide prairie collar tapering off to a frilly cuff paired with plain white jeans from companies I haven’t heard of, owned by white women who pose in beautiful minimal interiors. They want you to buy their goods but their material diet is one of abstinence. I google the price of her clothes and total that her outfit costs about three thousand pounds. The company which sells the top has this frolicky white girl cottage core aesthetic. In June 2020 they post a black square and from then on, they post frolicky Black women in the company’s cottage core aesthetic and say they acknowledge they have to do better. I meticulously research each item she recommends in a tastemaker list she is included in. She buys vintage designer clothes from high-end boutiques, plain clothes and shoes from expensive, independent designers who use their full names on their labels. I wonder why no one questions her on the nepotism she benefits from, I see it all as one system, this self-congratulatory circle of back-patting and unaccountability, a circle of whiteness that commends their open-mindedness but the kind of open-mindedness that looks just like them, a hall of mirrors in a closed room. I hover over the items she tags and recommends thinking, this is a way of getting close to her. If I buy these one-off items like her, from individual vendors, from makers who have limited edition runs of their very niche specific items like clay candle holders, or jugs, or plates, then I too will be a unique, rare and special person like she is and maybe the man I want to be with will want me and won’t throw me away like he does so dismissively, I will be something of note and care. I will be something to show off owning.