If the health and wellness industry is maddening and impossible to fit into, Self Care by Leigh Stein is the antidote.
The best satire I've read in a decade.
You know when you come across a meme that is so specific it makes you feel more than just seen, but like you could have written it yourself? I’m thinking specifically about one I saw last week about young kids and napping. Nobody tells you that you’re going to spend all your time trying to wrangle your kid down for nap, but when they nap they won’t get to bed until 10 PM, and if they don’t nap they’re terrors, and if they fall asleep for 15 minutes in the car then both nap and bedtime are screwed.
The meme is so specific and relatable, and while reading it I was like yes! And yes! And that too!
The feeling I get when seeing a relatable meme like that is the same feeling I got while reading Self Care by
. It’s a satire about the women’s health and wellness industry, and it is so specific that it feels universal. Leigh created such a real, hyper-focused world that anybody could recognize it from what we — particularly women but also men — are inundated with online.
Self Care is the influencer and wellness culture version of Best In Show, the Christopher Guest mockumentary about dog shows. The novel shares the story of the two founders of an app called Richual, which is a feminist platform that encourages and promotes self-care.
These two women go to the ends of the earth to be as woke, progressive, and inclusive as they can be, all while tending to — or trying to tend to — their own self-care. It’s told through the points of view of Devin and Maren (the two white founders) and their black employee Khadijah.
Devin, the “face” of Richual says, starts a lot of her scenes with descriptions like, “I was wearing Paige ultra-skinny jeans in White Fog Deconstructed wash, a sister wife-style blue cotton blouse with a ruffled lace-trimmed bib from Isabel Marant.” To remain the best face she can be for the company, Devin’s “anti-inflammatory, gluten-free, dairy-free, low-glycemic non-GMO organic meals” are delivered to her weekly.
You see what I mean about the hyper-specific?
Maren, the “bigger” co-founder at size 14, says, “When we launched Richual, I truly believed we were creating something valuable to help women care for themselves. Here, we said, buy this beach towel, try this ten-step beauty routine, rub this on your chakras, brush your skin, tone your vagina, lubricate your third eye, pumice your spiritual calluses, alchemize your intuition, spend all your time and money taking care of yourself because there’s no one else you can trust who will.”
Because it’s fiction, you know her perspective will be challenged, warped, and distorted. And because it’s an ultra-feminist platform, of course we have some sexual misconduct issues to deal with.
Here’s an example of what some of the activity on the Richual platform is like:
“I moderated little flares of outrage from the social justice warriors who couldn’t pass up an opportunity to let us know a photo collage of vegan lunches called “Nine Crazy Ways to Convert a Carnivore” used ableist language (crazy), or to report a white influencer for racism because despite repeated warnings from them, she continued to use AAVE1 in her posts from the gym (she thicc, that’s ratchet, SLAY).”
And, apropos of absolutely nothing, I have to share this because every single person reading it has heard something like this before: “There were no action items I needed to follow up/circle back/close the loop/just check in on.”
It’s brilliant, the whole book. Throughout, while Maren tries (and struggles) to be as put together and Richual-worthy as she can be, Devin chugs along at her normal pace, opening “a fresh page in her rococo floral notebook that had likely cost more than twelve dollars” and leaving the office at 5:00 so she could “grab a thirty-five minute Heart: Gratitude session” at her meditation studio and bring her attention to her breath.
After a yoga class, it was time for Devin to shower. “I had a mold-resistant and antimicrobial chrome showerhead so I wouldn’t get cancer. First I washed my hair with Christophe Robin purifying shampoo with jujube bark extract and then while my hair mask was soaking, I double cleansed with Kiehl’s Midnight Recovery Botanical Cleansing Oil, followed by a glycolic acid face wash…” and on and on she goes with her products and her routines.
There are a lot of mundanities throughout the story that Leigh supercharges with details like Devin’s antimicrobial chrome showerhead and Maren’s trip to “a clothing boutique with an ampersand in the title” where she bought “one pink dress in a size 14 and another identical dress in a size 12 that [she] could manifest [her] body into later.”
The book is hilarious. It is so spot-on that you’re almost led to believe the author is a part of the wellness influencer culture as well. But in reality, Leigh is the most humble, down-to-earth person2 who happened to do (I assume) a lot of research on this industry so that she could portray it so effectively.
Some reviewers point out how it’s all so cliched. Which — isn’t that the point of satire? Leigh isn’t necessarily making fun of the industry, but rather deconstructing it into entertainment. Whatever she did, it’s working for me.
As satire is her thing, Leigh is currently conducting one giant performative satire over on Instagram, where she’s posting about how she lost her job at Richual and is, most recently, interviewing for a job at Lunar Milk. These are made-up companies, but in the videos she doesn’t allude to that. You just know it’s a performance because you’ve read this book and you understand her wit and cunning attitude about the culture.
Self Care is on backorder over at Bookshop.org, and my guess is it’s because of all the buzz she’s been generating on Insta with her continued satire. It’s worth mentioning that this book was published in 2020. The fact that Stein is creating this performative art years after publication just goes to show how sharp she is.
“I held up my ten-dollar coconut water kale celery mango smoothie,” Maren says, “as evidence of my superiority and newfound devotion to treating my body like a temple.” If the wellness industry is maddening and impossible to fit into, Self Care is the antidote.
What I’m reading: The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok, On Writing by Stephen King, and World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwen.
What are you reading? Listening to? Loving? Thank you for reading! Love,
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AAVE = African American Vernacular English
Oh my gosh Kolina, this makes me want to read this book immediately. I've looked it up on various sites and it's funny to see it have a 3.15/5 stars on Goodreads. Reading the 2-star reviews down below of all the people who clearly felt the book hit a little too home for them is, well, interesting, to say the least. I've subscribed to her.
My book is on backorder at Bookshop???? WTF! Kolina, thank you SO MUCH for writing this review! I will share it on Instagram