Aesthetica

(Paperback)

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In a debut novel as radiant as it is caustic, a former influencer confronts her past-and takes inventory of the damages that underpin the surface-glamour of social media. At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity.Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the "black and white store," peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She too is seeking rebirth. She's about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica., a procedure that will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self.Provided she survives the knife. But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of "woke" masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid. Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of "Instagram face," delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #MeToo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities.

Reviews

Praise for Aesthetica

An NPR Best Book of 2022
A Vanity Fair Best Book of 2022
A Glamour Best Book of 2022

In a book about looks, the language is tasked with turning words into images. Rowbottoms buzzy and exacting vocabulary evokes a picture already resting in our minds and on our newsfeeds . . . Aesthetica asks whether someone devoted to beauty can decide to know who they are, rather than simply change it. Anna is stuck between ways of seeing: viewing one path as necessary and another as indulgence, past and future, eternal and ephemeral. No matter which we choose, we somehow always end up right back where we started, still believing we can somehow make ourselves over.
TheNew York Times Book Review

This debut novel follows a 35-year-old woman undergoing a surgery to reverse the plastic surgeries she underwent while she was a teenage Instagram influencer living under the thrall of an abusive manager and lover. Allie Rowbottoms book is as dark as it sounds, but its also vital, written with real anger and compassion. One of the best American novels so far about social media, its a chilling look at the state of todays worldboth real and virtual, although those boundaries keep blurring.
NPR

This brutal tale of a teenage Instagram model teases out the ugliness of influencer culture against our rather ancient tradition of performative femininity. Under Allie Rowbottoms patiently literary hand, this novels true gem lies in its central mother-daughter relationshipa reminder that our obsession with youth is never too far removed from what binds us to our lineage.
Vanity Fair

[Examines]and occasionally eviscerateseverything from social media consumption, to vanity, feminism, the city of Los Angeles and beyond.
The Hollywood Reporter

An edgy, whip-smart page-turner that does in fact keep you off your phone.
Nylon

Indispensable . . . The novel is uncanny in its ability to zoom in and lay bare the effects social media has on our perception of youth, beauty, and relevance, but it also raises questions about whether using your body as currency can ever be a form of self-empowerment, the cost of excessive self-promotion, patriarchal power dynamics, and whether the staggering amount of time and money spent to become visually perfect is ever really worth it.
Glamour

"Rowbottoms Aesthetica, released late last year, imagines a washed-up Instagram influencer in Los Angeles named Anna, who is preparing to undergo an experimental surgery called Aesthetica . . . Theres nothing supernatural afoot in Aesthetica, but when Anna slurs 'Im a star' while high on Percocet, staring at her phone, proud of her own worst impulses, its as terrifying as any tale of a woman in thrall to wicked powers."
Wired

A novel for anyone who exists on the internet and has wrestled with the dissonance between the self they project online and the body they inhabit in real life. Its a dark and probing account of fame and agency and the ever-watchful gaze that creates the culture we live within.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Allie Rowbottoms debut novel presents as a buzzy beach readand it is indeed devourablebut what lies beneath the surface hits at the heftiest themes. Grief, abuse, and the absurd beauty standards bearing down on women today collide in Anna, an aspiring influencer who becomes absorbed into the relentless world of social media, where womens bodies arein every senseno longer their own.
Red Magazine

Aesthetica allows us to camp out in Annas consciousness. The books intimacy discourages judgment. Instead, we find ourselves dwelling in the gray areas, where nothing is wholly good or bad . . . Aesthetica is not only timely, its also necessary reading.
The Observer

In this Los Angeles Gothic narrative set in the near future, an aging former influencer named Anna undergoes a cosmetic procedure that promises to reverse the many plastic surgeries she underwent seeking internet celebrity . . . As Anna reflects on the events that have brought her to this moment, readers chart her transformation from insecure teenager to Instagram star under the tutelage of Jake, whose money and power Anna cravesdetermined to rise above her humble upbringing by an ill single mother whose warnings about the perils of social media register too late.
Poets & Writers

Rowbottom wades through dueling waves of feminism, affectionate and critical of both second- and post-wave ideologies . . . There is no clear moral at the end Aesthetica, no satisfactory conclusion, no unified theory of implants, no winner in a culture war.
BOMB Magazine

Piercing.
The Millions

More than anything else, Aesthetica investigates the fallacy of reversibility. When young, dont we all imagine that life is a series of attempts that can more or less be undone without permanent consequence Once we step into the light of reality, we realize that there is no fairy godmother waving a magic TV remote with a giant double arrow button reading REWIND. The particularly graceful move in Aesthetica is to advance beyond the commonplace observation that plastic surgery is a futile attempt to flip the hourglass; instead, Rowbottom asks us to imagine a cosmetic procedure that would undo the undoing, reverse the decisions a public figure might make to look like the fantasy version of their true self.
The Brooklyn Rail

[A] twisted deep dive into the sordid nature of social media . . . Aesthetica is a brutal novel that forces you to look in the mirror before breaking it and using the shards to cut you open.
Buzzfeed

Social media having a dark side is by no means a new concept. Aesthetica takes the idea a step further by imagining what comes after where we are now. Rowbottom explores the future of our relationship with social media with raw honesty, nuance, and compassion.
BookRiot

Rowbottom is unafraid to portray the experience of living in accordance with an ever-evolving beauty standard as a perilous one, alienating and reliant on great sacrifice and pain . . . One of Aestheticas best, most genuinely thrilling qualities is its depiction of the intellectual and ethical whiplash that results from the collision of competing schools of feminism and ever-evolving bodily trends, leaving those who hope to balance sexiness and correct politics unmoored and dizzy.
Astra Mag

A conspicuous look at the toxicity of social media culture and the idea of perfection, Rowbottom deftly explores topics of mother-daughter relationships, exploitation, and feminism in this disturbing and raw debut.
Apartment Therapy

"The magic of the novel is in Rowbottoms lush and tender prose. She describes Annas experiences on Instagram and in medspas with a richness and empathy typically reserved for different kinds of protagonists (shyer, or more bookish, or more acerbic). The result is both heartbreaking and redemptive."
Hazlitt

Told in a split narrative alternating between the chaotic moments preceding Annas surgery and her tumultuous coming-of-age as an Instagram model, Aesthetica examines the lengths we go to in order to love ourselves. An exploration of womanhood and aging under the influence of social media and late-stage capitalism, the novel examines how internet culture impacts bodily agency and gender. At its core, Aesthetica is about the desire to be seen as we want to see ourselves.
Electric Lit

Allie Rowbottom is taking on the grand challenge of addressing fake realities that lie beyond the screen.
no kill Magazine

Compelling . . . Rowbottoms expressive and searching style is apt to capture both the bottomless emptiness and dark allure of image-centric internet life.
Irish Times

The book resists tired takeaways about our digital lives . . . Aesthetica is packed with evocative L.A. references, like Black Dahlia and El Coyote, along with more up-to-date ones, like weed spon-con and selfie walls.
The Cut

The Instagram Novel is trickytoo didactic, and you seem like a Luddite, too familiar, and youre rehashing previous territory. Too few seem like they have any other message behind Instagram is bad! but when a rare gem offers something new, it can be explosive.
OurCulture Magazine

Rowbottoms writing is not some clich-ridden, girl-power critique of the global beauty industry . . . Aesthetica is concerned with showing you who the characters are, how they rub against each other, how their lives and purposes bleed into each other and create mess. It is interested in that mess and contradiction.
KQED

[A]searing and brilliant debut novel which delves into the horrifying and all too real world of influencer culture.
AnOther Mag

Ruthless from start to finishsharply interrogating Instagram culture, influencers, the world of eating disorders and much more in this new novel . . . Rowbottom doesnt hold back: name dropping, calling out celebrities, and conceptualizing a world which feels all too familiar. Aesthetica is full of dark cynicism, but also bright lightit shines on the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, the way we handle (or avoid) grief, and the great lengths we will go to feel beautiful, even

Author Bio

Allie Rowbottom is the author of the memoir Jell-O Girls, a New York Times Editors' Choice Selection, Amazon Best Book of the Month, Indie Next Pick, and Real Simple Best Book of the year. Allie's essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, Lit Hub, No Tokens, NY Tyrant, The Drunken Canal, Alta Journal, Bitch, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Jon Lindsey.