Jessica Siskin is the author of the new novel Looks Perfect. She also has written the book Treat Yourself!. A former fashion executive, she's the founder of the business Misterkrisp. She lives in New York City.
Q: What inspired you to write Looks Perfect, and how did you create your character Stella?
A: Looks Perfect was inspired by my own experience as both a creator and consumer on Instagram.
I kept noticing that as a creator, people were constantly filling in the blanks about my life from what they'd seen me post with the most generous possible details, and that I was doing the same thing with the influencers I followed. But I knew from the other side how flawed that line of thinking was.
That observation is what sparked Stella's character; I wanted to explore the perspective of someone who is performing perfection amidst a really messy personal life that she doesn't have the space to really understand, and how she might come to understand that over the course of the story.
Q: Can you say more about how your own experience in the fashion and social media worlds affected the writing of the novel? Did you need to do any additional research?
A: The only thing I remember researching is what color the napkins are at Auntie Anne's. I'm sure I researched other things, but I didn't have to do that for details related to social media or fashion because I'm so immersed in both worlds.
I think it's funny that I ended up writing a fashion novel, because I always had such a hard time reading them since so much was always inaccurate, and I'm easily distracted by that kind of thing.
But having grown up with my mom working in the fashion world and then working in it myself, it was really important to me to write about how legitimate, meaningful, and challenging that work is, when many people still view it as frivolous.
Same with social media. When I first started writing the novel, I was getting a lot of feedback that Stella's character was too smart to choose to be an influencer, but these women are smart. Sure, some of it is timing and luck, but I find it hard to believe someone is building an empire without a good amount of savvy.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Stella and her boyfriend, Alex?
A: Stella and Alex are just completely missing each other. They're both extremely busy, they're in that season of life where they're pouring into their careers, and I think they both get a bit complacent and stop actually seeing each other.
What happens, especially because of the nature of Stella's work and how online she is, is that they start imagining projections of one another. So they actually aren't in the same conversation, even though they live together.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: When I first started writing Stella, I'd envisioned a totally different project, which was a dual perspective story about an influencer and one of her followers. I was telling myself it was a novella because I'd never written fiction before and that was all I could imagine pulling together.
I think I wrote three pages from the other character's perspective before I knew that this was actually just Stella's story, and once I knew that, the plot came to me and I knew the ending right away.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Aside from the full time and very meta job of becoming an influencer to spread the word about Looks Perfect, I started writing another novel.
Looks Perfect is very much about being in your early 30s, which is the age I was when I started it, and the story I'm working on now is about being in your early 40s, which is where I am now.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: While being a mega-influencer with a million followers may not be something everyone can relate to, I wrote Stella's story in the hopes that it would help people connect to and reflect on their own relationship to performance on social media.
We put so much pressure on ourselves whether we have a million followers or 100, and I hope Looks Perfect helps people build a relationship to social media that feels good and grounded for them.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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