Who You Think I Am
A Novel
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JULIETTE BINOCHE
This psychological thriller dissects online relationships, offering a stunning indictment of the way society perceives women in contrast to men when age comes into play.
This is the story of Claire Millecam, a forty-eight-year-old teacher and divorcée who creates a fake social media profile to keep tabs on Joe, her occasional, elusive, and inconstant lover. Under the false identity of Claire Antunes, a young and beautiful twenty-four-year-old, she starts a correspondence with Chris—pseudonym KissChris—which soon turns into an Internet love affair.
A Dangerous Liaisons for our times, Who You Think I Am exposes the disconnect between fantasy and reality. Social media allows us to put ourselves on display, to indulge in secrets, but above all to lie, to recreate a life, to become our own fiction—magnifying and manipulating the double standards to which older women are held when they refuse to give up on desire.
Simultaneously sensual, intellectually stimulating, and utterly relevant, this page-turner will stick in your mind long after reading.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Told through documents including depositions, transcriptions, and novel fragments, Laurens's (In His Arms) intricate and cerebral novel explores the construction of identity and the politics of age, gender, and desire. The story is introduced through tapes of therapy sessions between divorced 48-year-old comparative literature professor Claire Millecam and a therapist identified only as Marc B. Frustrated by her elusive lover, Joe, Claire decides to track him by friending his sometime roommate, Chris, on Facebook. To interest the younger "KissChris," she constructs a persona using the name Claire Antunes and a photograph of a younger woman she claims she found on Google. Her immersion in the virtual relationship with Chris and her false persona deepens, and both begin to obsess her but when she tries to make a break, disaster strikes. As the voices of Marc B., Claire's ex-husband Paul, and a writer named Camille Laurens are added to the narrative, the "facts" first established begin to dissolve, breaking open to reveal new possibilities. Though heavy-handed disquisitions on gender disparity and female aging early in the book may deter some readers, Laurens crafts the novel's nested secrets meticulously, producing tricky and thought-provoking surprises until the very end.
