Iman Hariri-Kia looks unapologetically cool and collected sitting across from us in a T-shirt she sells that proudly boasts “American Stress Dream.” It’s a statement that rings true for Rose, the protagonist in Hariri-Kia’s sophomore novel, The Most Famous Girl in the World. What is the American dream? Or is it a nightmare? What will you do to achieve it? Luckily, Lit Girl had the chance to sit down with Hariri-Kia prior to her event at Barnes and Noble promoting what surely is, the Most Famous Book in the World for that twist alone. Minor spoilers ahead, a major one flagged last.
LG: What was the desire to write from (Rose) the journalist’s perspective instead of Poppy the scammer’s?
IHK: That’s actually such a great question, I don’t think I’ve been asked that before. I really wanted to write a book that not only dealt with celebrity as a concept but the mirror that it holds to society and the way that celebrities' behaviors actually make us feel about ourselves and what it says about the inner workings of our own brains. In order to do that I also had to look at mass hysteria, bandwagon jumping, and conspiracy which all three rear their ugly heads in this book. So my hope that was by making the book from Rose’s perspective as she starts to devolve and fall further down the rabbit hole - and like, really fucking fall, not curtsey, like plummet to her death down the rabbit hole - I wanted readers to also feel like they were devolving too which is why I use mass media to make you feel like you are in the comment threads, on Reddit, on Twitter…because ultimately that’s where conspiracy is born. It takes one person saying something that then gets misconstrued for everyone to start questioning their reality. So I really wanted Rose to be our alias and I think that she and Poppy are such fascinating foils for each other and ultimately, hopefully, foils for the readers as well. In the same way that (Poppy) in her conversation with Rose at the end of the book sort of pushes her to think about why she’s so fascinated by Poppy and why she can’t let this go, I hope that those lingering questions remain with the reader long after they finish and perhaps they start having conversations with people in their own life about why we can’t scroll away from the people that we’re hate consuming.
LG: I mean that leads perfectly into - she’s been off, so spoilers - but Anna Delvey being on Dancing with the Stars. Do you think we as consumers have a responsibility to push back against turning these criminals or scammers into celebrities? I feel like there’s a weird balance there.
IHK: Yeah, that’s a very good question as well. First of all, Anna Delvey going on Dancing With the Stars was so insanely timed. While the book wasn’t initially inspired by Anna Delvey, she obviously is someone that I turned to a lot while I was writing because I think that her persona and lack of remorse makes her the…almost like a corny, campy, TV villain in some ways and she loves playing the villain in the same way that I wanted Poppy to sort of encompass all of these different, you know, scammer, villainous, anti-hero tropes. She’s a little more devious. And I think, to answer your question, I wouldn’t necessarily say that…the moral obligation falls on the consumer, I think ultimately this is part of a larger systemic issue of celebrity. I tried to get into this a little more with The Shred and the newsroom and the conversations they were having over behavior and how they got more excited the more victorious (Poppy) became. Ultimately, we live in a society that profits off of people’s bad behavior and it encourages other people who behave badly to lean into it as long as they’re doing it with authenticity to make more money. Obviously we’re all like imprisoned under capitalism. What I think the most consumers, readers, people who spend time engaging with celebrities have to do, I think, is stop and question why they are attracted to certain people and why people who behave so badly make them feel so good about themselves. It isn’t my intention to try and make people feel bad about their celebrity…
LG: Obsession?
IHK: Yeah, affliction haha. But I think working in media in journalism for so long I started realizing that ultimately in order to profit off of people’s ill fated decisions you have to constantly constantly be looking for, like, the worst possible way in. And it required dehumanizing, a certain dehumanization of celebrity and of people. So I don’t think it’s necessarily on readers, on consumers to like, chip away at the system brick by brick, but next time you’re scrolling I hope that you pause and think for a little bit and if someone truly is starting to chip away at your mental health, your self-esteem, etc., maybe taking a step back, unfollowing, removing them from your life - out of sight out of mind. As Rose should have done to Poppy.
LG: I think that’s a really good point as we’re talking about parasocial relationships. I think that’s a side (para-social hate versus love) that I don’t often think about. I think more about the people who are like, “Taylor Swift is my best friend” kind of thing versus, “Oh I have a para-social enemy online.”
IHK: I think both types of para-social relationships can be unhealthy. Ultimately the big issue with the state of celebrity in the year of our lord and savior 2024 is that we have a lot of trouble distinguishing between what we know of people and everything we assume of people. So who we want celebrities to be and who they actually are. I hope that as people finish the book they start questioning their own intuition, perhaps they start making excuses for characters whose heads we were never inside of and ultimately that’s the state of para-social relationships is that you’ll find yourself defending or arguing within an inch of your life for someone who you’ll probably never meet like Taylor Swift or Anna Delvey.
LG: I feel like some of those conversations (in the newsroom) about Poppy and how the more excited they get the worse things are happening really reminded me of the current political climate.
IHK: Authenticity can sometimes be valued above morality. So ultimately, we make allowances, we forgive people who do things that are morally corrupt or fully illegal as long as we feel like they’re doing in a way that they’re not lying to the public. It’s so interesting to me because I think the question at the heart of this novel is “how far would a charming celebrity con have to go to permanently turn public opinion against them?” Not just for a week, not just for a month…in that there’s no coming back. I think that’s really what Rose, myself, and this novel are trying to figure out.
LG: More specific to your experience in journalism, Rose mentions that she feels that drawing from this well of being Iranian-American and the stories she could generate from that may be just turning her life into content easily versus other things she could be writing about. I wonder if that’s something that you ever think about?
IHK: Totally. 100%. I think about this all the time because I entered media full-time at the height of the personal essay boom. I think that when I was on staff at Elite Daily I published something like thirty-eight personal essays in a year.
LG: Wow.
IHK: Not all of them were tied to my identity but a lot of them were. The first time I was ever published I was fifteen. I wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post and it was about my experience with Islamophobia in post-9/11 New York. At that time I felt like I had something very important to say - as a fifteen year old- which is hilarious looking back. And that I was the best suited person to tell that story. And I pitched it and I felt proud of it. When I was on staff at Teen Vogue, the first article that I wrote that was published for the online site that went viral - and this was, over five years later - was about my relationship to my hair which is what inspired that storyline in A Hundred Other Girls (Hariri-Kia’s debut novel). So, that again, it was a beauty article but it was very specifically tied to my relationship with my racial identity. Something that I’ve thought a lot about in the past ten years or so as i’ve seen the industry evolve and move out of the personal essay boom is how so many young, marginalized writers who are hungry and smart and talented were hired from like, 2013 to 2018/19, and brought onto staffs in digital newsrooms and then were sort of put in a box and encouraged to write about whatever topic as long as they were able to connect it or tie it back to their identity. The idea that you can have a queer writer on staff and just assume they’ll write about their coming out story over and over or they’re going to handle Pride Month reporting. Same with your Black writers during the pandemic writing stories on anti-racism. They’re teaching people to be anti-racist when it shouldn’t fall onto them. I could go on and on.
LG: Right.
IHK: Whereas a true equitable work environment that is actually focused on representation versus tokenization would be hiring all these writers and then allowing them to write about any and everything. Real representation is having someone from a marginalized background write about The Bachelor, and the environment, and politics because they’re going to bring their identity and perspective to any of those titles. And then if they want to write an essay about hair or if they feel entitled to write something about their experience it should be of their own volition and not because they’re being put in a box and encouraged to exploit their identity in order to keep a job. So this (The Most Famous Girl in the World) was an opportunity to explore the other side of that. Noora, the protagonist in my debut novel, was optimistic. Whereas Rose is very angry and sardonic and comes in being like “I am not interested in writing pieces about my personal identity I want to write something that fucking matters.” So I would love to see those two (characters) in conversation because they’re both Middle Eastern but they have completely different relationships to their identity and they have completely different relationships to their work.
LG: Do you think that they live in the same universe?
IHK: For sure. What I love about the characters in my books is that I could so imagine them all riding the same subway car together.
LG: Hariri-Kia cinematic universe.
IHK: I think Noora would really annoy Rose. I think they would need to get drunk together once to connect and decide they like each other. Yeah, I think if they met at a media party Rose would scare Noora and Noora would annoy Rose.
Dear Reader, if you have not yet read The Most Famous Girl in the World, the below is a major spoiler for the ending. You have been warned!
LG: I loved the fact that you flipped the whole (book) on its head because I feel like it lets you in on Rose’s paranoia a little bit where it’s like “oh! Maybe she was right to have a couple more questions.”
IHK: Oh my God! You are the second person ever to say that to me.
LG: We loved it! We had so much fun. Books will say they have twists and I did kind of figure out that the roommate had something and you get to that and you’re like “that’s a good twist!” It’s been so long since I’ve read a twist that has the Gone Girl of it all where you’re like “oh I didn’t know that was possible.” So I guess my question is did you know you were going to do that the whole time?
IHK: Yeah.
LG: Walk us through it.
IHK: Well first of all thank you so much for one, enjoying it and two, understanding why I did it. Literally you’re the second person I’ve met who’s said those two exact things to me, so I’m thrilled to hear that because that was my intention. Yeah, I think it’s very funny now that the word has gotten out about the ending being crazy because I feel now like I’m bamboozling people with the first, second, and third twists. People just keep being like “I got the twist over with!” and then they send me a DM of them screaming into the void or getting so angry with me. I tried to warn you! I told you guys this was satire! I wrote the ending first. I needed the ending before I sat down to write the book. I knew it was going to end this way the whole time. The reason I wanted to do so was threefold and they all connect.
LG: Okay.
IHK: Once I realized this was going to be satire I really wanted to make sure I was satirizing the format of the true crime and thriller genre. And that meant really really taking the tropes and expanding, distorting, exaggerating them. That’s why there are so many moments that feel too big to exist. I wanted it to basically feel like I was winking at the reader. And I wanted everyone who read it to know I was in on the joke, we were all in on the joke. I knew in order to do that I needed a twist within a twist within a twist. I wanted to create a Russian nesting doll effect.
LG: Love.
IHK: The second is that I am a huge re-reader. I am a big annotating girlie, I love to get in there with my pens and my sticky notes and I love to go back and figure out what I missed. And I wanted this to be a book that was more fun on reread for that reason. I left some Easter eggs in there as to what happened and I’m very curious to see if readers will catch that on the second time around. That was fun for me to write. And then the third is kind of what I already talked about. My hope is that the end would basically serve as a meta-gotcha moment for readers who felt like they finally had a handle on what was going on in the world of the book. I wanted as you read the last page, for readers to question their own intuition and whether they’d been reading the character profiles right. Maybe even defending Simon’s choices and actions. Then realizing that we never really got inside Simon’s head, we don’t know how he was thinking and feeling. There was so much we never saw. If we find ourselves defending him it’s almost a direct correlation to the way we find ourselves defending celebrities that we have para-social relationships with. So yeah, it was a bit of an opportunity to wink and nod at readers. I wanted this to be a full body experience of a book.
LG: It was. I could not sleep for two hours.
IHK: I’m sorry.
We’re not sorry. And rumor has it that Iman Hariri-Kia has the next two books in the Most Famous Girl potential trilogy plotted out. So get your pens out - first to write a letter to the editor demanding more, and then to annotate that Easter egg hunt re-read.