Fake Accounts

By: Lauren Oyler

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

"This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it." —Zadie Smith

A woman in a tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this “incisive” and “funny” debut novel that “brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personae tested in the real world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved--he was always a little distant--and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual?

Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age

Don’t waste your time & money!

The author is a smart writer that writes in the most boring manner. Sadly, I thought the premise was initially interesting but she proved me wrong.

Keep your credit for a better story.

Starts great, but so many missed opportunities

I feel like this is not the book you think it is. It is not the book you want it to be. And I wanted to love it. Oyler does a great job poking at the vapidity of middle class millennials but... somewhere near the middle, the book itself descends into an inwardness of character that loses the bigger picture... and it starts to feel inexcusably vapid itself. I couldn't finish it. And this was AFTER I urgently sent it to all my friends after the first few chapters. Maybe it would have redeemed itself... I hope you finish and tell us it does.

Well

I don't know what I listen to. I can relate 100% but I just don't know. I don't dislike but I don't like.

Thin plot, lots of padding, prolix literary color

What to say? Intriguing idea. I listened through the “back story” section. The protagonist is a young woman with opinions on just about everything. “Back story” started slow. Typical diversion is a lengthy description of the icons an interface on an iPhone circa 2006. I had one, don’t remember, don’t care. The plot finally gets going, possibly interesting, slowed down with a long digression on the protagonist’s experiences at the women’s march following Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Then, yikes! A five hour long section titled “Nothing Happens.” I think this section deals with what the reviews described as “satire” regarding social media. I’ve listened to the protagonist’s discussion of the pros and cons of women getting their nails done (disclaimer: my wife regularly gets her nails done; my wife’s explanation is more succinct and to the point); a description of buying groceries at a Turkish deli in Berlin, and a description of the t-shirt worn by a guide in Berlin sometime in the past. I don’t know if I can stand five hours of this before getting back to the plot. This is a first novel. I feel that the author has included and exhausted all the exercises from writing classes. It’s like being trapped in an NPR segment. I can’t imagine there’s anything left for the author’s second novel.

No

I did not enjoy this book really. It’s a book about a persons feelings about modern life. The plot is thinner that wet toilet paper, but plotless books can be good. I didn’t enjoy it but someone will.