The mystery novel taking on child influencers
“I like to write about the things that scare me the most,” Olivia Muenter says.
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Back in 2020, Olivia Muenter was recommended to me by Reddit—which, as anyone who has been on snark Reddit knows, is not what users normally go there to do. But Muenter kept coming up as an example of an influencer doing it right, perfectly balancing aspirational photos with relatable content, being thoughtful about social issues while providing a fun escape. As her debut novel, Such A Bad Influence, makes clear, that kind of reputational tight rope is not easy to walk.
The former Bustle writer’s novel is not autobiographical. Unlike Evie, one one of the novel's main characters, Muenter joined social media as, basically, an adult, and while her 43,000 Instagram followers are nothing to sneeze at, today’s incoming class of creators can boast two million followers on TikTok and still be nowhere near household names. But the topics of performance and perfectionism are rooted in Muenter’s own time online, and the novel’s story—in which Evie, who came of age as part of a family YouTube channel, goes missing while on a livestream—is inspired by much of the child-influencer discourse we’re having today.
Muenter relates much more to the protagonist, Hazel, who’s 10 years older than her sister Evie and much more spotlight-averse. It’s up to Hazel to find out the truth of her disappearance, which means learning about a side of her sister she never knew.
In addition to writing Such A Bad Influence, out June 4, Muenter co-hosts the popular Bad On Paper podcast with author Becca Freeman. She balances this on top of content creation.
“Everything on the internet, I've pretty much done it all,” she says over Zoom. In this conversation, we talk about translating internet stories into literature, the internet moments that inspire her work, and her entry into the scariest part of the internet: BookTok.
This is a timely moment for your book because I feel like the ethics of children on the internet and influencer children, that's a conversation that a lot of people have started having. What drew you to that topic specifically?
I have a very small platform. When you think of an influencer, I feel like people think about Evie, the character in this book, or someone with hundreds of thousands of followers, and I just have a small but lovely following that I've really enjoyed. However, I've also experienced some of the downsides. So I feel like I have a pretty realistic and healthy view of social media as someone who's worked on the internet for a while. In fact, when I was in college, I wrote this article for Bustle and it went viral, and it was Instagram versus reality, what I posted versus what was actually happening. And so in a way, this topic has sort of always been top of mind, but I guess my point is that I feel like I have a realistic view of how social media isn't real, but I still have struggled with having a brand or being a creator. And so I was like, okay, well imagine if it wasn't 40,000 followers, it was 400,000 or 4 million, and imagine if I wasn't 18 when I got Instagram, what if I was eight? And then I expanded on it from there.
Were there any specific internet culture incidents or creators or that you were inspired by?
I think if you exist on the internet and you read the book, you'll be able to see parallels. No single character was inspired by any single influencer, but there are definitely bits and pieces that have inspired all of it. A really small example that's in the book for a second is the egg cracking trend that was going around a few months ago that we added at the last minute, which I think is honestly in and of itself a very good example of how navigating social media, if you have children and you have your children on social media, it's very difficult because you're figuring it out in real time. Something seems very harmless to you, and then it blows up and you kind of learn a million reasons why maybe it's not. So that's a very small thing, but there are, there are tons of examples like that.
Was it hard to bring to life something that is 1) fundamentally happening on a computer and 2) moving so quickly?
It's definitely difficult because a lot of people say when you're writing fiction to not include a lot of pop culture references because by the time the book comes out, they're not relevant. So this is the ultimate example of this. For example, there's a really prominent scene in the book where the character goes live on TikTok. But originally it was Instagram, and then I was like, “Wait, a 19-year-old would never be going live on Instagram.” And so we had to go through and change every single mention. There's lots of stuff like that. But I think throughout the book there are a lot of interstitials. So there's podcast transcripts, there are Reddit threads, there are newsletter excerpts. There's a little bit of everything, which is kind of how I inserted the internet into it. I think overall, hopefully if someone were to read it, it's more about the experience of existing on the internet rather than it is the internet itself. So I hope someone who reads it can be like, “Oh, I can relate to this feeling 10 years ago, as much as I can relate to this feeling now, even though the apps we're on have changed or evolved.”
Were there any books about social media, fiction or nonfiction, that you were inspired by or that were part of your process when writing this?
Not so much books, I guess, although I really do enjoy—and this came out when I was towards the end of the process—Stephanie McNeil's Swipe Up For More I thought was really interesting. But it was more just the internet itself, every day, new articles, podcasts I listened to. I think it was an episode of The Daily, I can't remember, but it was interviewing a girl who had grown up on a YouTube channel and her experience with that and how she didn't like it and, and how her, I think it was her gymnastic meets, were filmed and stuff. So I drew a lot of inspiration from stuff like that, also the lawsuits that are happening more now about kids who have been on the internet and are like, “I wasn't a fan of that, mom. All the naked photos you posted of me as a baby,” or whatever. So it was more that kind of stuff.
Are there any specific things that Evie experiences in the book that you put in there because it's something that you connected with from your experience being somewhat public online?
I think in general, I relate way more to Hazel than I do to Evie, because I struggle with the same things Hazel does in terms of comparison way more than, “I have this massive platform and I'm a celebrity,” which Evie is. But I think there's a general sense from Evie of just always being a step ahead of what everyone may think, even if it's something really innocuous. There's this particular scene where she's eating and her sister is gonna post a photo of the food. And she's like, “We can't post that because then people will think I'm dieting.” And Hazel's like, “Well, aren't you dieting?” And so it's this constant calculation of like, “I need to seem approachable and accessible and real, but I also need to be conscious of everything I'm posting so I seem just real enough.” And I think anyone who has been on the internet in any sense and has strangers follow them can probably relate to those calculations. And I certainly can, even if I maybe can't relate to the exact scenarios.
You've been a writer for a long time. What brought you to fiction versus nonfiction?
I started writing fiction in 2020 and it was honestly just like baking sourdough. I was like, “I love to write. I don't know why this has never occurred to me.” I think it felt like too big of a dream, and I wasn't sure how it would feel because I've written personal essays for so long. But it just felt really natural to me. It felt like, “Oh, I can write about all these feelings I have in this very creative way in different scenarios and different characters” and all of that.
I love the comparison of it being like pandemic sourdough. Another thing is, obviously you're on social media, so you're aware of things like BookTok. How do you feel about how books now are consumed in a whole new way thanks to TikTok?
I mean, it's all very meta to be honest, because every time I think, “I should create this piece of content or this piece of content that promotes the book,” I'm thinking about every theme in the book about yourself as a brand and things going viral and all of that. SoI am a little bit intimidated by BookTok, to be quite honest. I posted one TikTok the other day about it, and it was sort of about this experience I had when I got the book and you're supposed to film yourself unboxing it, there's like emotional music playing in the background, and you're crying. I did record it but I didn't hit record, so like, I just have this vision of me on my front steps having this really big moment and I was like, “Oh, the internet has really broken my brain.” And I'm like, “Oh yeah. The entire book is that.” So the TikTok was sort of about that experience. But I find the internet very confusing when it comes to book stuff. And also the one thing I have learned, being sort of aware of the industry through Bad On Paper, the podcast I co-host, is that you can't really control BookTok. Things just go the way they're gonna go. Like it's gonna go viral and you cannot control it at all. Which I think is better. I'd rather just be like, you know, “Do with it what you want.”
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What do you hope people's main takeaways from the book will be?
It's interesting because I feel like when people read the synopsis of the book, they're gonna be like, “Wow, this is someone who has really strong feelings about children on social media or how people manage their own social media use in general.” And to be honest, I don't, and I don't really want anyone to come across or to end the book and think that it's a directive. I just want people to sit back and think about their own social media presence and use in a way they haven't before. But what someone thinks of it is really not my goal. If someone can have a more critical view of themselves or how they consume content when it comes to social media, that would be great. And I mean critical in the terms of thoughtful, not beating yourself up. Because honestly I can barely manage my social media use, so I don't expect anyone else to either.
Are there any other areas of social media or the internet that you'd be interested in exploring through fiction?
Well I am working on something right now and it is very different. I've actually been working on this longer than Such A Bad Influence. I kind of put it aside, went to this, came back to it. But there are similar themes, but it is different. It's not about the internet necessarily, but it is about cultural obsessions. I'll say that. And I think in general, through essays or fiction, I just like to write about the things that scare me the most, and I find the internet and cultural obsessions very generally terrifying for various reasons.