Allie Rowbottom

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(tm), 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 life-threatening 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.

Aesthetica

Lindsay

“I look at myself as an art project, and I’ll create whatever I want until I want to stop.”

I already knew things. Womanly things, like love is overrated and pleasure is a right.

I read that a frozen face has been proven to a make a woman happier than an expressive one; she looks in the mirror, sees less trouble, and becomes it.

She said that negotiating the cost of survival was the sad reality of global capitalism. That along with responding to humanitarian crises, rampant racism, cultural appropriation, and economic inequality, on a personal level we were all tasked with determining lesser evils.

Aesthetica quotes

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