Like Me: A Novel

Written by Hayley Phelan

Narrated by Lauren Ezzo

A seductive psychological thriller about obsession, illusion, and female identity in the digital age.

Though beautiful, cunning, and privileged, nineteen-year-old Mickey finds herself with a stalled modeling career, an escalating drinking problem, few friends, and next to nothing in the bank. To numb her growing despair, she spends her days frantically refreshing her Instagram feed, obsessively tracking the movements of Insta-famous model Gemma Anton.

Mickey sees Gemma as a perfected version of herself. Gemma is living a seemingly perfect life: a skyrocketing career, a famous boyfriend, and adoring followers. It’s the life Mickey wants more than anything. Mickey studies every detail Gemma offers through the window of her phone, trying to absorb, mimic, become the object of her growing fascination.

When a chance encounter thrusts Mickey into a world of opportunity, she is met with surprising—and immediate—success. But as her online persona begins to take over, the line between reality and illusion disappears. Then suddenly, so does Gemma.

Engrossing, sharp, and astute, Like Me is a shimmering portrait of infatuation, disconnection, and identity—and a dazzling introduction to a brilliant new voice in contemporary literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781713641575

Hayley Phelan

Hayley Phelan is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, ELLE, Vogue, and the Wall Street Journal. Her column in the New York Times, Browsing, ran for two years in the Style section, where she continues to contribute. She was born and raised in Toronto and currently resides in Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.hayleyphelan.com.

Reviews for Like Me

[Stephen Kastner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great Testament on influencer culture. And the reader performance was excellent.

[bumblybee-190414 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was one of my Amazon First Reads choices for February. Phelan does a great job of capturing influencer culture, from the obsession with brand names to the addiction to social media numbers. Yes, it is annoying how often Mickey brings these things up and rattles them off - but that is the entire point. While I'll admit that I don't know a lot about the behind-the-scenes side of things, everything that happens feels believable and like it could be part of a real person's experience. Nothing is sugarcoated here, to the point where there are a large number of content warnings that come into play, but to gloss over any of them would do the book and the characters a disservice, and I appreciate that Phelan doesn't look away from some really disturbing scenes. That being said, I found that there were definitely areas that could do with some improvement. The biggest for me is the sheer amount of summary - there is so much of it in between scenes, and the paragraphs end up being long and rambly. At first, I thought that this has something to do with Mickey's voice and desire to keep the reader at an arm's length, but by the end I realized that that isn't the case here - the entire epilogue is a summary, and honestly makes the rest of the book worse for it. If Phelan is attempting to have Mickey thinly veil lies with these summaries, that's one thing, but it wasn't clear to me that that was what was going on here; if you're going to execute something like that, you really have to nail it, and it clearly didn't work for me. Most of my other critiques would likely be solved with more attention to scene: everything with Julia and Blake, and the italicized sections about "the girl," to name a couple. I don't mind having questions by the end of a book - in fact, I prefer it - but when they start to pile up rapidly and many of them have to do with character, that tells me that something is amiss. Either making Mickey's intentions with the summarized scenes more clear, or just providing more active scenes would do a lot of the heavy-lifting for these.I spent some time trying to decipher how I feel about this book, and ultimately I think I fall on the "meh" side of the scale. It definitely kept me reading to the end, but there is nothing earth-shattering here. And perhaps there doesn't have to be - I'm not a big thriller/suspense reader, so for me this was a nice change of pace from my usual reads. But for those who devour the genre, this may feel more like trodding a well-worn path.