Journalist and now author Tanya Sweeney spoke to David Hennessy about her debut novel Esther is Now Following You which deals with themes of celebrity, social media and parasocial relationships.
For many years, Tanya Sweeney has written about subjects including celebrity culture for titles such as Dubliner, STELLAR, U, Irish Tatler and the Irish Times magazine.
She is currently a journalist and Weekend magazine columnist at the Irish Independent and is a regular contributor on Irish radio and TV.
But it is something that happened to her early on in her career when she was living in London that inspired her debut novel, Esther is Now Following You.
When Esther, an Irish woman living in London, goes through a miscarriage, it changes something in her.
Her new interest in an actor called Ted Levy quickly becomes infatuation and then obsession as she looks to escape her own life.
When Ted gets a new celebrity girlfriend called Alice, Esther makes a crazy decision and quits her job, takes all her savings and books a one-way ticket to Canada.
After a series like Baby Reindeer shone a light on stalking behaviour, Esther is Now Following You also comments on issues like social media and the modern accessibility of celebrities.
Tanya Sweeney took the time to chat to the Irish World about the novel.
How did the idea for Esther is Now Following You come to you? What was the lightning bolt of inspiration if you can remember?
“Well the lightning bolt came years ago when I was living in London.
“I was working at MTV and one of my jobs was to man the viewer enquiry line.
“This woman rang up one day a couple of weeks out from the Europe Music Awards and said, ‘Listen, I’m the secret girlfriend of a very famous pop star, can I get two passes to the awards show?’
“Of course I’m 20, wet behind the ears and she had this huge spiel, kept me on the line for 20 minutes saying how she’d fallen out with his management and his agents and I was her only hope of surprising him for his birthday.
“And I fell for it because I was an eejit and went into my boss who said, ‘Tell her to sling it’.
“I went back in and she went bananas at me, this woman and I remember thinking, ‘God, these people are just so clever’.
“Imagine having the neck and the nerve to ring up MTV and demand tickets.
“I just thought, ‘There’s something here’.
“I never forgot about that woman.
“Obviously you hear about celebrity culture all the time and I was writing about it as a journalist and I was just fascinated with the Swifties and the Beyhive, Beyonce’s gang.
“Now we have the Chalamaniacs, Timothy Chalamet fans.
“I just always found them really fascinating.
“They obviously congregate and are their own tribe independently of Taylor Swift or Timothy Chalamet or whoever.
“I just loved that collegiate sense of community that they all have but it’s also something deeply unhealthy because we know now that parasocial relationships are invasive and they’re unconsented interaction and celebrities or the person who’s on the receiving end of them don’t know how they’re going to end or what’s going to happen next.
“It’s scary for them.”
It would have been very easy and perhaps predictable to write this story from the perspective of a victim but instead you asked how someone could come to ring MTV like that woman did to you. You asked yourself, How did she get there?
“I really did.
“I have had many crushes and there’s something really gorgeous about a crush.
“I love having a crush, that feeling of yearning and of wanting somebody who maybe doesn’t want you back or doesn’t even know you’re alive, as is the case with Esther.
“I wanted to write about what that was like having those kind of imaginary relationships in your head.
“There’s a couple of scenes where Esther is on a sun lounger with Ted.
“Her imagination has gone turbocharged because she’s going through a tough time and she wants somewhere to kind of park her brain for a bit.”
And you can understand the worry from the point of view of Ted or his girlfriend Alice. We have seen celebrities being hurt or even killed by deranged fans time and time again..
“Exactly.
“We hear about the stalkers and we never really hear their point of view.
“And I thought it would just be so interesting to see how far she would go.
“I think we’ve all had a celebrity crush where we know our place and we know not to jump on a plane to try and make it happen.
“But Esther does.
“She takes it too far.
“Of course she’s telling it to us as though it’s a love story and something she’ll be telling the kids at one point but obviously, as people outside of that experience, we’re reading it going, ‘What is she going to do next? This is utterly terrifying’.
“And we do find out a little bit at the end about Alice’s experience of being stalked.
“We can see it cast a long shadow on her life definitely.”
What other experiences informed the character of Esther?
“Funnily enough I would have spoken to a lot of boy banders over the years, and I’d go, ‘God, my friend used to love you so much they used to ring your home phone number just..’
“The boy banders would be horrified at hearing this obviously.
“Of course we would have thought, at 14, this was great fun and games but I started to realise, ‘No, this was actually not nice for the people on the receiving end’.
“When Baby Reindeer came out, I interviewed a couple of people who had been the targets of stalkers and I really understood how horrifying that experience is.
“Of course most people would be going, ‘Would you not be flattered with the attention from a lovely woman?’
“But I think they were very scared, very uncertain.
“And, as I said, stalking is unconsented and unpredictable and I think we know now in some ways it’s almost about a power thing or an abuse thing.
“It may start as romantic infatuation but it turns into something completely different.
“It was a major eye opener definitely.
“And you hear these stories more and more often.
“It’s a really strange time to be a celebrity.
“We think we’re their friends but also we don’t see them as real people. It’s weird.”
It’s the danger of social media really, isn’t it? It really aids Esther in her stalking. These days people, and not just celebrities, can give away a lot online…
“100 percent and this is why I set it in 2010/ 2011 because obviously now we’ve had that conversation around stalking and you’ve got now people like Chapell Roan and even our own Nicola Coughlan going, ‘This is wildly inappropriate, back off’.
“Back in 2010 it was absolutely wild.
“We were just friending whoever, putting any information up about ourselves, telling people where we were in real time, showing our houses, showing our front doors.
“I think I started to only understand afterwards.
“I was like, ‘God, we had no regard for our privacy or for our safety’.
“And that was why I really set it there because Esther really doesn’t quite know how inappropriate she’s being but also the celebrities and the people around Ted just don’t understand that.
“They just haven’t a notion that there might be people out there friending them for nefarious reasons, as Esther does.”
There is good reason why Esther wants to take a break from her own life. She is grieving..
“She is very damaged, very hurt, really suffering.
“I think that’s why I set it in London.
“It’s very, very easy to fall through the cracks if you don’t have a support network.
“She has a husband but he is also struggling with his own loss and they start to fracture.
“Then her friends start to just ease back into their own lives the way people do after a pregnancy loss and she’s like, ‘Well, I’m not getting supported here’.
“So her crush can really just grow unfettered and then of course she falls in with the Tedettes who are all mad for him and Ted is the prize.
“I think that almost drags her even more into the idea that Ted is somebody she needs to win.”
The Tedettes, a Facebook group dedicated to him, show how poisonous an echo chamber can be…
“As a journalist I’ve written about Beyonce, Harry Styles, Adele but I remember writing a column on Taylor Swift.
“I hooked it on Taylor Swift moving from one relationship into another within about 27 seconds.
“I was saying, in general, people need to grieve before going into a new one.
“But the Swifties came at me one Friday night on my Twitter en mass.
“It was actually anthropologically fascinating for me.
“I think I might have actually had Esther up and running by then so I was like, ‘This is brilliant’.
“But these were all people who were threatening me, abusing me, calling me a slut shamer and defending Taylor Swift but they were also doing it for themselves, for each other.
“You’d go on to one of their profiles, ‘I will kill anyone who says anything bad about Taylor Swift’.
“And you’re like, ‘Wow, this is kind of fascinating but grim as well’.
“And I hope that people who have those kind of profiles really do get something healthy out of it but I’m not entirely sure.”
Were you thinking of anyone in particular writing the character of Ted?
“I have a real fascination with that Jewish, American/ Canadian comedian type who are really funny.
“They’re really seen as comedic geniuses and people really respect them and say that they’re visionary artists and they’re attractive in a non-obvious way, in the way that Ted is.
“I think I say a lot of the time Ted is quite schlubby but he’s got beautiful eyes that Esther really falls for.
“I think at one point he starts going on a keto diet and the Tedettes lose their minds because they’re like, ‘We want him to stay as he is. We don’t want him to go Hollywood’.
“I was looking at actors who were maybe C/ D list because they have incredibly involved fan bases who see them as almost an equal.
“It’s one thing if you’re fancying someone like Timothy Chalamet who is a major A list star but somebody like that you would almost see them and go, ‘I could be their friend’ or, ‘I could be their girl’.
“There’s a part of your brain going, ‘We could be mates. They’re fun’.
“So somebody like that, definitely.”
So someone with Seth Rogen’s everyman quality?
“Seth Rogen, yes.
“If we’re casting this now, Seth Rogen actually would be perfect because he’s schlubby but hilarious and you just love to be around him and you think he’s great fun and he gives out that same energy actually that Ted does.
“Ted says in interviews, ‘Oh, I’m just a regular guy. I don’t even know what I’m doing here’.
“That’s his whole shtick.
“And I can see how that would engender a fan base because you’re just being so not caring about that whole Hollywood system or that game.
“So yeah, there’s a definite everyman quality and I think for someone like Esther, she’s not totally deluded.
“I think there’s a part of her going, ‘If I ever got in a room with this guy, I could charm him and something could happen’.
“When there were edits happening of this book I kept getting, as editorial feedback, ‘Why is he not hotter? He needs to be a pin up. We need to understand the attraction’.
“And I was like, ‘You actually don’t. Esther needs to think this guy is gettable, that if she met him in the street or saw him in the street, there’s a chance’.”
Who comes to mind to play the main character, Esther?
“I’m fantasising deeply and of course I’m staying Irish because she is a very Irish character.
“I love either Eve Hewson or Nicola Coughlan because I think they elevate everything they’re in.
“They’re almost too beautiful to be in this role because Esther has to look at the supermodel Alice at one point and still be deluded enough to think she’s in with a chance and if she’s as beautiful as Alice, that won’t really work as a moment.
“Their beauty hits you in the face and Esther’s beauty kind of sneaks up on you a little bit.”
The thing is that the real Ted may be very far from Esther’s perception of him..
“Exactly.
“I’m in celebrity journalism so I fully understand that there is a version of a celebrity that is presented to the public and is handled by a number of PR machine people and then there is the real person.
“I’m not sure the public have even got their heads around how big the chasm is between both of those versions of reality.
“I think that’s something I’d like to even explore in a future book.
“We see this persona of somebody and then you see them in real life and I mean the public haven’t a clue.
“They really don’t.
“I can see that and I just think it’s fascinating.”
The other thing about setting it in 2010 is that it was pre- #MeToo when we saw a lot of people unmasked and it is hinted Ted has a darkness there..
“Exactly.
“There’s an epilogue where it’s four years after so it would have been that 2016 kind of area.
“There’s a little sort of Easter egg in there where there’s a very young fan who is very, very horny for Ted in the Tedettes.
“She writes all this fan fiction about him and she’s very clearly very attracted to him and there was a hint that maybe something happened there.
“I didn’t want to get into it too much but I did want to be like, ‘What’s the situation here?’
“I mean she’s obviously under the age of consent.
“We have had very black and white conversations around consent and the age of consent so this would have been a non-consensual encounter but back then we were not clear on it and I just wanted to throw that little thing in and be like, ‘Well what happens if you’re underage but you are very actively pursuing this person?’
“Because obviously back in the 60s and 70s, there would have been a lot of that.
“People who were 15, 14 and huge fans of certain pop stars.
“I don’t think we’ve ever really unravelled that conversation properly but I just wanted to add a little kind of flick to it really at the end of the book.”
Marian Keyes and Liz Nugent are two authors who have said kind things about the book. What is it like to get those sort of comments from those sort of writers?
“To get praise from people like Andrea Mara, Liz Nugent- Marian is the goddess.
“The first time I heard anyone say anything nice about the book I was kind of bowled over because I was like, ‘Well, this is just me writing this to get the writing monkey off my back’.
“I didn’t really think anything would really come of it so to have people respond so strongly to it, and especially people who I so admire, that was actually incredible.
“The readers have been hilarious.
“A friend of mine texted me last weekend and went, ‘I didn’t sleep at all on Friday night and I’ve just spent three hours crying’.
“And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry’.
“And someone else said it’s like being strapped into the Thelma and Louise car and it’s heading towards that cliff.
“I was like, ‘Wow. Amazing’.
“Yeah, it’s been great, really gratifying.”
Esther is Now Following You is out now.
