If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die: An Influencer Memoir

In her muddled debut, social media star Tilghman peels back the veneer of her @leefromamerica Instagram persona. Chronicling the rise and unraveling of her online identity, Tilghman details her obsessive days of content creation: 10-hour stints responding to comments, posting aspirational photos of smoothie bowls and candlelit baths, and tailoring posts about her polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis and disordered eating to maximize engagement. “I realized I had unlocked an entire content strategy,” she writes about the discovery that her most emotionally vulnerable posts garnered the most clicks. While Tilghman offers trenchant insights into the psychological toll of influencer culture, including the strain it put on her personal relationships, the aftermath of her decision to delete her account is glossed over in the book’s brief final chapters, and her ambivalence about returning to Instagram (“I’m now open to making money from my own social media again”) muddies the memoir’s takeaways. Despite moments of bracing candor (she admits to writing “Keep feeding the cult” in a diary entry about her followers), this will frustrate readers seeking a more definitive reckoning with internet fame. Tilghman pulls too many punches. Agent: Lauren Hall, Folio Literary. (Aug.)