'What a Time to be Alive' is a dive into the fragmented realities of influencer fame

The overnight influencer story is this generation’s sudden popstar/Disney Channel star search. Fantasizing about influence, money and/or both isn’t new, but the brand of fame that influencers have is. 

“What a Time to be Alive” by Jade Chang explores influencer fame through the eyes of protagonist Lola Treasure Gold following the sudden death of her best friend, Alex. Lola didn’t seek fame. She was, without consent, cut into a video featuring her best friend’s last moments, and the video went viral. She didn’t know she was being recorded when she went on her drunken rant, andshe definitely didn’t ask anyone to edit it or post it. 

“Had they done me a favor or had they cursed me?” Lola wonders early in the book. “I’m still not sure, but without that edit my words would never have had the effect they did.”

“What a Time to be Alive” unfolds in a series of vignettes that jump from month to month. Rather than following a plot beat by beat, we catch little snapshots of Lola’s life for an entire year, starting in January. This can feel like checking in with a long-distance friend — you’re following along and then it’s like “Wait who is this person again? Why are we mad at them?” For those who aren’t used to it, the reading experience can be a little fragmented and more challenging to follow. 

Lola has skeletons in her closet, makes less-than-stellar decisions about love and money,  and there’s an entire subplot about finding her family who she’s estranged from, but none of these things really dominate the book. Real life isn’t driven by a single plot, but in a novel, it’s hard to feel the stakes of so many subplots competing for attention. When plot points from the early chapters are playing out toward the end of the book, they lose some of their impact. 

But if the novel is about anything, it’s about friendship. The book starts and ends with Lola’s friendship with Celi, her other best friend who writes a song in honor of Alex, which is also cut into the viral video. Celi goes on her own journey with fame in the music industry, and the two of them figure things out together. 

In stories about sudden fame, friends always act as counterbalances or mirrors for how the main character reacts to fame, and “What a Time to be Alive” is no exception. She doesn’t have one foil; she has multiple. There’s Celi, who experiences fame at the same time but really differently. Then she has her second mom, Denise, who’s constantly rotating between multi-level marketing schemes and tries to capitalize on Lola’s fame, and separately, there’s Vikash, her love interest, who works in a startup whose new technology is still in development (read: probably grifting people). 

Each of these characters shines a light on the way Lola reacts to her newfound fame. Social media is so much about how you make other people feel. It’s analogous to cult leader status, which is itself similar to MLM or startup founders. Everyone is selling a story that other people can be a part of. But all told, while Lola embraces the fame, it doesn’t change her that much. She’s broke, and then with the help of the internet, she’s not as broke. But she doesn’t go from rags to riches overnight. 

There are more internet-famous people now than ever before. It makes sense that this experience of being thrust into the limelight is fertile ground for a novel, but there’s a tension in books about internet fame and specifically influencers: big fame makes high stakes, but that kind of internet fame doesn’t come around often. The fame Lola comes into (around 200,000 followers) means she’s recognized by a certain subset of people, asked to do events and have brand deals. It’s life-changing, but it also would only put one at the bottom of the second-biggest influencer tier (macro) for brand marketing. With our fragmented attention and personalized algorithms, we live in a world where there are people with millions of followers that the average person has never heard of.  

Regardless, “What a Time to be Alive,” is an interesting look at fame, not knowing what you’re doing in your twenties, the role of social media in our lives and the friends who are along for the journey of figuring it out together.