‘Follow your heart and speak your truth.’
For Samantha Miller’s young fans – her ‘girls’ – she’s everything they want to be. She’s an oracle, telling them how to live their lives, how to be happy, how to find and honour their ‘truth’.
And her career is booming: she’s just hit three million followers, her new book Chaste has gone straight to the top of the bestseller lists and she’s appearing at sell-out events.
Determined to speak her truth and bare all to her adoring fans, she’s written an essay about her sexual awakening as a teenager, with her female best friend, Lisa. She’s never told a soul but now she’s telling the world. The essay goes viral.
But then – years since they last spoke – Lisa gets in touch to say that she doesn’t remember it that way at all. Her memory of that night is far darker. It’s Sam’s word against Lisa’s – so who gets to tell the story? Whose ‘truth’ is really a lie?
‘You put yourself on that pedestal, Samantha. You only have yourself to blame.’
Idol is an incredibly timely novel that looks at social media influencers and lifestyle gurus and asks how well we really know them. We see only a portion of their lives, heavily curated for their audience, and it brings to mind the idiom of not knowing what goes on behind closed doors.
Samantha Miller is a lifestyle guru with a legion of adoring fans. Her latest book heads straight onto the bestsellers list, her follower count is booming, and her company, Shakti, is about to go public in a deal that will make her millions. She is living the dream, having worked her way up from nothing. To go along with her new book, she publishes an essay that immediately goes viral, detailing a formative sexual experience with her best friend from school (not named, yet not subtly masked, either). She talks about it as a beautiful moment, and so she’s genuinely shocked when that friend gets in touch and says that she remembers the experience very differently to Samantha, claiming that she did not consent and that the experience for her was much darker than Samantha’s essay would have you believe. Such a claim, if made publicly, would be devastating to Samantha and her business, and she decides to visit that friend – who she hasn’t seen since they were 18 – to understand her side of the story and to ask her to retract the statement.
What follows is a clever and thought-provoking novel as Samantha revisits her childhood town and seeks out Lisa to understand why she’d make such a claim, and perhaps a chance to reconnect as Samantha seems to genuinely regret that their friendship lapsed. Along the way, we learn more about Samantha, and I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure about her as a character. She’s undeniably successful, yet I found her patronising from the outset – her fans are young women, typically in their 20s, and yet she refers to them as “her girls”. To me it felt as though she was highlighting their inexperience and naivety while offering to show them the right path and how they should be living their lives, all while making money from it.
And it becomes apparent that while Samantha now seems to have everything going for her that she had previously hit rock-bottom having struggled with addiction in various forms. That’s all in the past when we meet her, and yet it’s clear that some of those predilections are still present, coming to the fore when things don’t go her way. It was fascinating to meet her former friends from school who cast her character in a very different light to the one that she portrays – from their perspective, she comes across as someone who is manipulative, ruthless, and determined to get her own way at any cost. Some of this could be sour grapes – Samantha is in an enviable position after all, and some people delight in taking down such individuals – or it could be that Samantha was very different as a teenager, having not yet grown up. On the flip side, it does raise the question of whether she’s a reliable narrator or whether she’s deliberately whitewashing the past to portray herself more favourably.
Idol is a novel that deals with many themes and yet successfully avoids becoming weighed down by them. It’s a short novel, and I love the way that it progresses as the truth of that night is gradually revealed. I don’t want to give away anything else about the plot, but it becomes something of a she said / she said as we try to work out what happened all those years ago and who’s version of events we should believe. I raced through it, desperate to know what the outcome would be and what it would mean for Samantha. Not because I cared about her character – I wasn’t sure that I wanted her to succeed, but I wanted to know the truth (the actual truth, not Samantha’s truth) and to see how she would deal with it.
Readers should be aware that Idol does contain mentions of sexual assault – nothing graphic – as well as minor elements of drug use and addiction, but it’s a novel that I highly recommend, and, in particular, it’s one that I think would make an excellent book group read as there are plenty of things to discuss.
Jo's Book Blog 
I do love books set around social media Jo, and this sounds really good! x
I think you’d really enjoy it in that case!
Great review, Jo!
Thank you, Nikola! 🙂