Chapter 5: Idol by Louise O'Neill

What happens when someone challenges your personal 'truth'?

The American setting of Idol threw me in the first few pages. This wasn’t what I expected from Irish author O’Neill, whose last novel was set off the West Cork coast on a windswept and isolated island. 

But within the first couple of chapters, I could feel the familiar O’Neill touch: an unlikeable (maybe even detestable) main character, sharp prose, and a moral dilemma that would haunt me long after the final sentence. 

In Idol, we meet Samantha Miller at the pinnacle of her social media fame. She’s just hit three million followers, her new book is topping the bestseller charts and fans are clamouring to attend her in-person events. The website she founded, Shakti, is now a multi-million-dollar business. 

In the lead-up to her book publication, Samantha has written about a secret sexual awakening she had with her best friend Lisa as a teenager. The essay goes viral. And then an email lands in her manager’s inbox: it’s from Lisa, accusing Samantha of misrepresenting what happened that night. 

Things quickly spiral – as they so often do in the age of online outrage and cancel culture – so Samantha heads back to her hometown to confront Lisa, and the past life she thought she’d escaped. 

Flipping between the present and Samantha’s teenage years, Idol asks how we can choose the stories we believe about ourselves and other people. What is individual truth and objective truth – and how do you reconcile the two when they’re misaligned? How do you trust yourself?

Alongside this, Samantha’s single-minded pursuit of prestige in her career left me feeling even more cynical about the role of the influencer and ‘wellness guru’ today. (We can all picture the type of women who no doubt inspired Samantha’s alternative healing/therapy-speak image.) 

It was also slightly chilling to think about how we can all fall victim to seeking solace and acceptance in online communities – and how this may even encourage us to act in ways we may not have otherwise. What kinds of lives are we curating in these pixels?

Despite how abrasive Samantha is as a character, I was very quickly hooked on finding out what happened to her. This really is a specialty of O’Neill’s – making us utterly invested in characters we wouldn’t ever really want to be around. 

Even weeks after finishing Idol, I’m still conflicted about the ending. For the book, I think it was perfect, but I can’t work out whether it left me happy or sad for Sam. And ultimately, that ability to hang around my head is the mark of a good book for me. And exactly the kind of thing that inspires me to write here. 

More on this topic:

• Not long after I finished Idol, I read this piece from Bustle: Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?

• Amanda Montell’s book, Cultish: The Language of Fanatacism, is the perfect accompaniment to a lot of the questions O’Neill raises about the blind trust so many put in wellness gurus and online influencers

• This interview with O’Neill is an interesting insight into the making of Idol