Read a free chapter from The Followers
- Allen & Unwin
- 15 hours ago
- 8 min read
Reinvention is easy when it's online....
Beautiful, manipulative Lacey is a lifestyle influencer turned bestselling author who preaches self-love and body confidence to her million followers.
But one of those followers is Teresa. She remembers Lacey as a prepubescent mean girl who kept the loyal members of her gang—Teresa included—on a short leash. Twenty years later, she watches Lacey from afar with the ghost of her younger self and a copy of Lacey's new self-help book for company. While Lacey seems to have rebranding down to an art form, Teresa can't shake their past so easily ...
Read on for a sneak peek at The Followers.
It’s been years since Lacey was my friend, but I still see her every day.
Outwardly, it would appear that time hasn’t changed her all that much; at least not as much as I know it has changed me. In primary school there was something surprisingly grown-up about her face. Her features were sharp and defined, not obscured by puppy fat like mine were, and her thick eyelashes made it look like she was already wearing mascara.
In adulthood the opposite is true. She looks younger than I know her to be. There is something teenage in the sharp angle of her shoulders, and the way her hip bones suggest themselves through the sheen of her latest swimsuit. ‘Every body is a bikini body,’ she whispers emphatically in the pep talks she records for her followers. And yet, I credit my reluctance to ever be seen in a bikini directly to her. I can’t try one on without being plunged back into her swimming pool, where her gaze behind goggles felt as pointed and unrelenting as change room lights do today. I didn’t know a single other family with a pool back then—to have one was an uncommon luxury—and because of this, every detail of hers sits clear and bright in my memory: the emerald-green colour of the fence, the mosaic of blue tiles at the bottom that felt smooth and rough beneath your feet, the point at which it became too deep to stand and you felt safety slide out from under you.
The Group used to while away whole days in there together, diving to retrieve items that Lacey threw to the bottom for us (sometimes plastic fish, other times our own valuables) and tugging bashfully at our rashies whenever water billowed up under them to expose our soft, shameful bellies. One sweltering day towards the end of summer, Lacey’s mum walked outside to meet us with a box of brand-name ice-creams, the cardboard shimmering enticingly with a coating of ice crystals from the freezer. She handed them out to us with calm efficiency, only faintly registering the joy we each received ours with. After she’d disappeared back indoors, Lacey decided that we weren’t allowed to finish eating them.
She dripped water across the hot tiles on her walk over to the wheelie bin and deposited hers in first. Then she held the lid open until each of us had resolutely dropped our ice-cream in too. ‘It’s for your own good,’ she told us.
The memory of this is enough for me to tap ‘like’ every time Lacey posts a picture of herself swimming, usually above a pithy caption about how all bodies (not just hers, because that goes without saying) are beautiful and worthy of love. Given that there are a million others who also follow her, it’s unlikely that she notices this quiet nod from me.
For what it’s worth, though, she does follow me back. I’m under no illusion that this means we are still friends. In fact, it’s inaccurate to call what we had friendship in the first place.
Friendship with Lacey felt like a warm hand pressing very tightly against my throat. Back then, the difficulty breathing felt better than the chill of abandonment that overcame me every time she would, just for a second, relax the pressure. Twenty years later, I wonder why I still care enough to follow her. Why do I allow her to interrupt my days with her fractured visual narratives, her advertisements for herself, her daily announcements that she is happy, her life is magic, her heart is full? The reason has to lie in the past. For me, the past is where Lacey—the real Lacey—will always live.
****
10 April 2021 Laceyloves
A few weeks ago I mentioned a secret project that I’ve been hard at work on. I’m thrilled that I can finally tell you what it is. My debut book— Glow Up Already—is coming soon, and I am SO EXCITED to reveal its cover to you. Here in the Laceyloves community, we believe that #allbodiesarebeautiful, but you know what? Some book covers aren’t. This book cover, though. OMG THIS BOOK COVER. I think it’s nothing short of extraordinary. When I saw it for the first time, I cried. It somehow captures all the bad bitch energy and creative power that poured out of me as I wrote this book. So, what is Glow Up Already about? This question can be answered hundreds of thousands of different ways, because Glow Up Already isn’t a book about me, it’s a book about you. #GUA is not a one-sided conversation. It’s a book that requires you to do some work. Inside these pages you’ll find a generous serve of anecdotes and learnings from my thirty-one years of life, alongside writing prompts and exercises designed to help you
1) unlearn toxic ways of thinking,
2) discover your creative potential,
3) find joy in the everyday,
4) harness the strength you need to become the main character of your story and
5) glow up, already. I wrote this book to help you step into your power and transform into the person you were always meant to be.
You’ll be able to find it this October wherever good books are sold.
ID: The image is of a book with a very exciting cover. On it, we see an illustration of a young woman with long, dark hair sunbaking on a stripey beach towel. She wears red, heart-shaped sunglasses. Her bikini bottoms are black and high cut. On her beach towel, to her left, we see her discarded black bikini top and her mobile phone. The sky above her is electric blue and the words ‘GLOW UP ALREADY’ appear in white skywriting.
****
I bought Lacey’s book last night and, in my opinion, it’s terrible. Not that my opinion matters; it hasn’t stopped it from quickly becoming a bestseller. I wouldn’t even call it a book, to be honest. It’s more like a series of worksheets that have been bound together and given an ISBN. The font is suspiciously large. I know that she claims to care about accessibility, but I don’t think she’s done it for readers who are vision impaired.
Instead, I’m reminded of the students in my Year 10 class who think they can use fourteen-point font and wide margins to conceal the fact that their essays are well under the word limit. I did to her book what I do to those essays: I sat on the sofa with a glass of wine and counted the number of words in it. I can report that there are 4562 in total, spread across eighty six pages. Thirty of those pages are blank. That’s more than a third of the book. I once read that it’s possible to sell people nothing; to make the absence of physical matter commercially appealing. Doughnuts are an obvious example: part of what you’re buying is the hole in the middle. This is different, though, because you expect a doughnut to have a hole in it; you don’t expect a book to be full of blank pages. Lacey is a bestselling author whose debut work is shorter than some of the Year 12 papers I’ll be marking this weekend. And yet this speaks, I think, to something uniquely brilliant about her: only Lacey could convince readers to buy a book that they have to write themselves.
When I was done counting the words in Glow Up Already, I decided that I may as well respond to one of the prompts. The one on page thirty-four stood out to me as the obvious place to begin.
Write a letter to a person you’ve been letting live rent free in your head for too long. You may have cut them from your life already, but it’s time to cut them from your thoughts, too. Your head belongs to you, hun. Let the page opposite be their final eviction notice.
The page opposite, of course, was blank. I pulled a purple gel pen from my pencil case—one of many pens pilfered from the floor of my classroom—and began to draw a picture of Lacey. I drew how I remembered her on the day of her eleventh birthday party.
Straight hair falling past her shoulders; a crop top exposing her taut, flat stomach; and, on her face, the expectant grin of someone who is ready to be fawned over by everyone for hours. Next, I drew marbles around her body like a border: lots of small, purple circles encircling her, a simple pattern that spread like bacteria right out to the paper’s edges.
When I finally put my pen down, thirty-five minutes later, I didn’t feel like I’d evicted her from my head at all. If anything, I’d extended her lease. The mistake was probably to draw her. That wasn’t the instruction, after all. Every term, in the week before exam block, I lecture my students on how the world does not reward people who fail to follow instructions. You could sit at your desk and pen me the most breathtakingly insightful character analysis of Atticus Finch I’ve read in my life, I tell them, and it still wouldn’t do much good for your final grade if the question was asking you to focus on the thematic significance of him saying that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. Read the question, I repeat verbatim, and then please, please just answer it. I don’t normally hold much sympathy for the students who miss this point entirely, and especially not for the ones who roll their eyes and claim that the questions I ask them are stupid anyway. There are at least three of these naysayers in every class. They insist that I am overthinking everything, that stories are just stories, and that the author probably actually meant nothing by any of the lines and details I’ve obsessed over all term.
Perhaps, I say to myself, it is my turn to step into these kids’ shoes and walk around in them; my turn to answer questions written by someone I believe is coercing me into adopting a false voice, and expressing ideas that belong to them and not me; my turn to pen words that I believe are trite and derivative and disconnected from reality.
I resolve to attempt one more prompt from Glow Up Already—as an exercise in empathy if nothing else. The random page I open the book to feels like it was written especially for me.
YEAH THE GIRLS
Women are stronger when we work together. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for the support of close friends and collaborators like @SeriouslySunny and @RubyTuesday. And then there’s the 1.2 million beautiful people who have chosen to follow me: without them, there would be no Laceyloves community. Have you collaborated on a project, big or small, with your girls before? How did it go, and what did you learn from it?
***
An extract from The Followers by Maree Spratt - available now in paperback, ebook and audio.
The Followers
by Maree Spratt
The Followers is a sharp debut that explores themes of peer pressure, girlhood, identity, social capital, and how schoolyard dynamics translate to social media.
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