Smartphone (Wi-Fi enabled) in hand, we’re ready to take on the world. The Internet: it’s our alarm clock in the morning, our source for news throughout the day and one of the main ways we maintain our social lives. We live in the digital age (there’s certainly no denying that) but, on our quest for more likes and keeping tabs on the latest viral sensation, are we losing touch with the real world along the way? In her debut novel, Fake Plastic Love, Canadian-born author Kimberley Tait explores the effects of the web and social media on the way we perceive reality. We recently chatted with her (IRL) about her book, and her own relationship with the ‘net—talk about an eye opener! —Johnnie Smart
Why did you decide to write your novel, and why now?
I started writing Fake Plastic Love to explore some of the powerful forces that surfaced in the mid-2000s—in particular, social media and the distorted relationship many young professionals began to have with work and achievement. A very complicated and high-pressure millennial backdrop began to take shape. Both personally and professionally, young people became caught up in a harrowing race to gather as many gold stars or “likes” as possible. But was the person with the most gold stars and “likes” the happiest person? What was this mad race all about and was the proverbial winner actually the loser? I wanted to write a story that tackled those questions, showing how very different characters would navigate and ultimately survive in this hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world. The book draws heavily on the themes I explored in my senior honours thesis at Dartmouth College: "Beyond the Glitter and Glare: Life as a Staged Performance in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald." When I wrote that thesis in 2000 and 2001, I could never have anticipated how relevant performance theory would become in everyday life with the explosion of social media.
Can you describe some of the themes in the novel?
Fake Plastic Love is a tale of bright young millennials pushing off from undergraduate life and grappling with what success, love, and happiness actually mean in our digital age—a time when style and substance are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Ultimately, it’s a story of how reality holds up—or so often doesn’t hold up—to expectations, at a time when it is extremely tough to figure out what is real and what is an illusion. Narrator M. is a hardworking and loyal employee at her investment bank, but gradually learns that her iconic firm may not be everything she has built it up to be in her mind. Meanwhile, her blogger best friend, Belle Bailey, curates a pretty online world, pulling the wool over the eyes of friends and strangers alike. The radically different worlds of banking of blogging may be more similar than we would have ever imagined: in both cases, slick surfaces may be disguising a more grisly reality underneath.
Disillusionment is another important theme in Fake Plastic Love. Many high-achieving young people today are weighed down by a sense of disappointment—after being told by their parents they could work hard and do anything, it turns out life isn’t the linear trajectory they imagined it would be. Meanwhile, social media tells us that all of our peers are fantastically successful, always a step or two ahead of us. To symbolize this, you’ll see the ideas of flight and aborted flight woven throughout the novel. Nostalgia is another key theme. We have entered a strange moment in history—most of us are plugged in and fully digitized, yet we find ourselves longing for a simpler, more romantic, offline time. Dreaming of an easier time and place provides us with an easy escape hatch. And this is where the Internet really excels. The Atlantic ran a wonderful article a few years ago that observed: “Nostalgia, at its most basic level, requires access to memories—and there is, of course, no better archive than the Internet.”
In this same vein, Fake Plastic Love is a story of the Romantic and the Realist that I think are living inside all of us. M. is the quintessential Realist and Belle is the ultimate Romantic—the two are drawn together but are constantly in conflict. We’re a messy mix of both of romance and realism, but the novel argues that the Romantic will ultimately win and can overturn everything in the end. Now more than ever, I believe we need to encourage the Romantic. We need more old-fashioned love stories. We need more La La Land. In a sterile, unsentimental, and frequently shocking world, we are in dire need of more Romance with a Capital R!
What are some of the challenges that 20-somethings face now that they may not have in previous generations?
When I was growing up, and for the first half of my 20s, there wasn’t a need to document or broadcast your everyday life. You just lived it. How totally romantic is that? The only broadcasting you did was sharing an update in the class notes column of your printed alumni magazine. (And of course there have always been those curious people who draft detailed end-of-year update letters and include them with their Christmas cards.) Today, thanks to social media, everyday life has the quality of a spectacle. We fall into the trap of thinking that something hasn’t actually happened unless we have posted it online, when in fact the most important and wonderful and surprising moments in life are by definition un-post-able. We are encouraged to boast, showboat, overshare, to claim ownership of things and places—and in turn it makes everyone unhappy. Why on earth are we doing this? Research has proven that using Facebook depresses us, while in-person social interactions uplift us. There is too much virtual voyeurism. People are able to see too much without having to look anyone in the eye. By following friends and strangers online, everyone is measuring themselves against so many benchmarks, many of which are totally unattainable. Frustration and dissatisfaction is inevitable.
How has the digital world influenced the way we see our lives?
The concerning thing about the digital world is that we can never be totally sure whether what we are seeing and reading online is real and genuine or fake and choreographed—or if it’s a blend of both, which most things probably are. I am an enthusiastic user of Instagram, which fills the role that scrapbooks used to have in my life, but am constantly amazed at how literally people take it. I take everything I see online with a giant block of salt; if people don’t, it becomes very dangerous. When social media first took flight, people adopted a sort of “bare all” mentality. Over time, they started culling their online presence, stripping it back to showcase only the prettiest and most exclusive. Even if we understand it’s just another person’s picture-perfect highlight reel, seeing so much startlingly green grass all around us can be very demoralizing. It can so easily make our own realities seem inadequate. Because as hard as you try, you’ll never have a fighting chance to keep up with the Joneses if those Joneses don’t actually exist.
What do you hope people take away from your debut novel?
Most of all, I hope readers enjoy the voice and style of Fake Plastic Love. My biggest goal is to craft beautiful prose and compelling, sometimes larger-than-life characters that transport readers. Language and atmosphere is much more important to me than a gripping plot line. Of course I want readers to be engaged—but I want the sentences and characters to be what engages them. I have always been drawn to books with distinctive voices and a transporting atmosphere that envelope you and carry you away into some other bewitching world. I also hope readers will give some thought to the moral of the story. M. comes to many realizations about the “real” world and about herself by the end of the novel. One of her biggest epiphanies is that we are all a grand total of what we spend our time doing in our life—so what do we want to add up to? I hope young graduates and people of all ages who read Fake Plastic Love will be more introspective and more thoughtful about what and who they devote themselves to, both professionally and personally.
What can we expect to see from you in the future?
A second novel, I hope! I am working on manuscript now that draws from my experiences as a Canadian romanticizing and ultimately moving to the U.S. in the late 1990s. Oh, how geopolitical tables have turned in 20 years! It’s a fascinating time to explore questions of national identity. The story is told in an even more lyrical and sentimental style that I hope will appeal to readers who enjoy Fake Plastic Love.
share:
Be the first to comment