Hayley Phelan

A propulsive psychological thriller that follows an aspiring model down a social-media-fuelled rabbit hole of obsession, narcissism and self-destruction. For Mickey, a struggling 19-year-old model trying to make it in Manhattan, Instagram offers a tantalizing portal into the world she wishes she inhabited. Though beautiful, cunning and privileged, Mickey finds herself at the beginning of summer 2019 with a stalled modeling career, an escalating drinking problem, few friends (not counting the toxic men she entertains by night) and next to nothing in the bank. To numb her growing despair, Mickey spends her days maniacally refreshing her Instagram feed, where she obsessively tracks the daily comings and goings of Insta-famous model Gemma Anton. Gemma is a perfected version of Mickey. Beyond being the same age, and bearing more than a passing resemblance to one another, Gemma is living a picture-perfect life--complete with a skyrocketing career, a famous photographer boyfriend and hundreds of thousands of adoring followers online. It's the life that Mickey wants more than anything for herself. She studies every detail Gemma offers through the window of her phone, trying to absorb, learn, mimic, become the object of her growing fascination. At the height of Mickey's obsession, a chance encounter thrusts her into a world of opportunity, where her biggest asset may just be her willingness to conform to someone else's identity and exploit it for all its worth. Mickey's increasingly unhinged attempts at mimicry and shamelessly performative online "wokeness" are met with surprising success--and hundreds of thousands of new Instagram followers. But as her sepia-filtered online persona begins to take over her life, her mental state becomes even more fractured and it becomes increasingly difficult to separate reality from the algorithmically-optimized façade of Instagram. Engrossing, sharp and astute, Like Me is a shimmering portrait of infatuation, disconnection and identity in the digital age--and a dazzling introduction to a brilliant new voice in contemporary literature.

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