A social media influencer''s empire is burned to the ground--literally. The top suspects? The five daughters who made her famous. “A witty and razor-sharp whodunit that will leave you both satisfied and challenged . . . A gorgeous, gloriously scathing story.”--Ashley Herring Blake, author of “Mother May I” Iverson has spent the past twenty-five years building a massively successful influencer empire with endearing videos featuring her five mixed-race daughters. But the girls are all grown up now, and the ramifications of having their entire childhoods commodified start to spill over into public view, especially in light of the pivotal question: Who killed May’s newlywed husband and then torched her mansion to cover it up? April is a businesswoman feuding with her mother over intellectual property; twins June and July are influencers themselves, threatening to overtake May’s spotlight; January is a theater tech who steers clear of her mother and the limelight; and the youngest . . . well, March has somehow completely disappeared. As the days pass post-murder, everyone has an opinion--the sisters, May, a mysterious “friend of the family,” and the collective voice of the online audience watching the family’s every move--with suspicion flying every direction. A campy and escapist exploration of race, gender, sexuality, and class, <The Influencers< is an evisceration of influencer culture and how alienating traditional expectations can be, ripe for the current moment when the first generation of children made famous by their parents are, now, all grown up--and looking for retribution.

Autorentext

Anna-Marie McLemore

Klappentext

**A social media influencer's empire is burned to the ground—literally. The top suspects? The five daughters who made her famous.

“A witty and razor-sharp whodunit that will leave you both satisfied and challenged . . . A gorgeous, gloriously scathing story.”—Ashley Herring Blake, author of Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date**

What do you really know about the people you’ve made famous?

“Mother May I” Iverson has spent the past twenty-five years building a massively successful influencer empire with endearing videos featuring her five mixed-race daughters. But the girls are all grown up now, and the ramifications of having their entire childhoods commodified start to spill over into public view, especially in light of the pivotal question: Who killed May’s newlywed husband and then torched her mansion to cover it up?

April is a businesswoman feuding with her mother over intellectual property; twins June and July are influencers themselves, threatening to overtake May’s spotlight; January is a theater tech who steers clear of her mother and the limelight; and the youngest . . . well, March has somehow completely disappeared. As the days pass post-murder, everyone has an opinion—the sisters, May, a mysterious “friend of the family,” and the collective voice of the online audience watching the family’s every move—with suspicion flying every direction.

A campy and escapist exploration of race, gender, sexuality, and class, The Influencers is an evisceration of influencer culture and how alienating traditional expectations can be, ripe for the current moment when the first generation of children made famous by their parents are, now, all grown up—and looking for retribution.

Leseprobe
we the followers of Mother May I

When the news first broke, everyone wondered: Who was May Iverson? And why did she look so familiar?

But we already knew her. We’d been watching her for years.

Mother May I’s very first post had been almost twenty-five years ago, on a platform that didn’t even exist anymore. She’d started with tricks for bad hair days, the fastest way to frost a cake, last-minute Halloween costumes, stunning table decor from things you probably already had around your house. May Iverson, the woman behind Mother May I, was a mom of three, and then four, and then five daughters (at the time of that first post, the eldest, April, was four, twins June and July had barely started walking, and January and March would be born over the next couple of years).

May Iverson was both maddeningly glamorous (how were her nails never chipped?) and relentlessly encouraging. She reminded us all that we were doing the best we could. She told any of us who needed to hear it, “You are a good mom. And all this is optional. Your kids’ happiness doesn’t depend on a wire-ribbon bow. This is all for fun. Remember, you’re already a good mom.” That became her reassuring catchphrase at the end of every video. Remember, you are already a good mom.

As her following grew, so did her ad revenue and her rate for sponsored content to show off a new planner or setting powder. Mother May I would tell us about the lipstick that stayed all day so a busy mom didn’t have to reapply, as though she was sharing a secret with a friend. She’d detail the benefits of the meal-kit service that made her evenings “just so much more relaxing. This has turned my routine into a gourmet ritual.” Until she was, increasingly, making her living by telling us how to live.

Cosmetic companies sent her KitchenAid stand mixers in the latest colors, ostensibly as birthday (and later, wedding shower) gifts, but more likely so she’d give their new bronzer a good review instead of saying that it skipped on application. Designers delivered free gowns and jewelry for fundraisers, hoping she’d show them off in front of the step and repeat. A fragrance line made a perfume bearing her name, pennies’ worth of ester chemicals in a fancy bottle, surrounded in the ad by flowers and billowing fabric.

In two and a half decades, May Iverson had turned herself into a name that drew both sneers and aspirational sighs. She had turned her content into an empire, complete with makeup, swimsuit, and kitchenware collaborations. She had—thanks to the work of surgeons, aestheticians, coaches, and trainers—kept her fifty-three-year-old face and body looking so astonishingly young that no one could believe her eldest daughter was now twenty-nine.

A lot of us thought she’d changed in the past five, seven, maybe even ten years, and not in a good way. It didn’t ring true anymore, her still giving tutorials on the flood-iced cookies she used to make for school bake sales. It wasn’t just that her children were all adults, all in their twenties, long gone from the world of locker-room linoleum and PTA fundraisers. It was that the designer bag on her kitchen counter declared she could have just as easily bought immaculately frosted cookies, or made a donation.

She made stabbing tries at being relatable by talking about the puffiness under her eyes, and then showed off tricks with spoons chilled in the refrigerator, even though she could afford weekly facials and frequent microneedling. She relayed her favorite ways to mix and dilute essential oils, even though we all knew she had home fragrances blended especially for her by a famous parfumier in Lyon.

She said she never dieted—“it’s more about being in harmony with your body, listening to your body, loving your body”—but then did sponsored posts for appetite-suppressing tea. The few times she cried genuinely on camera threw into harsh relief how different it looked from when she faked it, and how often she had. There was the time she complained about caterers not bringing out micro-batch cheeses early enough, so they didn’t soften properly by the time her first guests arrived. Even those of us who still adored her cringed remembering her post about how so many desig…