Not even writers are safe from the lure of self-promotion on social media, at least according to authors Allie Rowbottom and Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, who each recently published coming-of-age novels chronicling the noxious impact of internet culture on millennial adolescents. This fall, Rowbottom—who earned critical acclaim with her 2018 memoir Jell-O Girls: A Family History—is back with Aesthetica, a provocative debut novel about an Instagram celebrity who hopes to reverse her surgical and spiritual transformations. Hacic-Vlahovic also published her second book, a work of auto-fiction that chronicles the chaos and child-like desperation inherent in the North Carolina punk scene during the early days of blogging, aptly titled: A Cigarette Lit Backwards.
