Review: I Was Born For This by Alice Oseman
I Was Born For This by YA author and illustrator Alice Oseman is a heartwarming and eye-opening look at the often misunderstood world of fandom and online culture, which brings to life a delightful and very human set of characters with compassion and nuance.
The novel, by 27-year-old author and illustrator of the sensationally popular (for good reason) Heartstopper series of graphic novels, follows teenage fangirl Fereshteh (who goes by her online alias of Angel) and the object of her affections, Jimmy Kaga-Ricci, one-third of the sensationally popular boy band The Ark (which, while fictional, certainly finds a few parallels in the real world). The novel has a dual narrative structure, flipping between Fereshteh/Angel’s and Jimmy’s perspectives over the course of one week, during which the former attends an Ark concert and meet-and-greet with members of the band, including Jimmy.
What follows in a very eventful week causes both Fereshteh/Angel and Jimmy to call a lot of what they thought they believed into question, as both fangirl and boyband member begin to interrogate their commitment to their various causes, at once lending the novel a bildungsroman feel and facilitating discussion of the highs and lows of being a fan.
Alice Oseman effortlessly and joyfully brings these characters and others to life, treating her subjects - and the subject matter - with compassion and non-judgement, while discussing questions of friendship, teenage identity, fandom and online friendships. At a decent 400 pages, the novel packs in a lot, both in terms of themes explored and story told, even if it does take place over the course of just a few days.
As a millennial herself, Oseman channels the Generation Z voice so well. I was truly impressed by the way she writes from the point of view of a teenager in 2018, getting the tone so right, sounding neither patronising nor clichéd.
Oseman also has a particular gift for bringing the characters on the page alive in a really believable way, especially those Gen Z characters. Each of the characters has their own well-drawn vulnerabilities and strengths, nuances and inner conflicts - there are no stock types or clichés, which could be a worry when writing a novel about fans and boy bands. The first-person perspective goes deep beneath the surface of what being a fan — and a member of a boyband — is really all about.
Indeed, my favourite part of the novel was the intelligent discussion of fandom, which sits at the novel’s very core. In this respect, I found I Was Born For This enlightening and eye-opening.
At countless moments in the novel, the fans are said to truly love “the boys”, or “our boys”, that they “would take a bullet for them”, “do anything for them”. Fereshteh/Angel and her online friends congregate together in London ahead of the concert to gush over the minutiae of online content of the boy band, specific lines of their back catalogue of songs, and the subtlest of flicks of their hair in YouTube videos of their concerts.
While I had my days of being a One Direction fangirl, it never escalated much further than watching a lot of their YouTube videos and fawning over posters of them that I’d cut out from teenage magazines; I never graduated to a fully-fledged superfan who would “take a bullet” for these band members, as some of Oseman’s characters say they would. It’s possible that, as a result, I unfairly considered extreme fandom to be a bit weird, and for boy band super fans to be obsessive and single-minded.
But I can’t tell you how much I Was Born For This has given me a fuller understanding and appreciation of the complexities of what being a fan means.
With adolescent hormones giving their worst, and teenagers’ bodies and minds in what feels like constant turmoil, their sense of self is often flimsier than ever before — and possibly flimsier than it ever will be again — and so it perhaps makes sense that teenage fans invest so much energy and enthusiasm into a group of boys who themselves are barely over the crest of adolescence.
Oseman makes clear that when boy band members sing their ballads and look directly into the camera, you can imagine they’re looking at you; when they share a joke with a band member on a YouTube video you’re watching, you can imagine you’re there in the room with them, in on the joke and laughing along with them. From this point of view, it perhaps makes sense that teenage fans construct their sense of self around these friendly, smiley, (and maybe in love with you!) boy band members, when the real world around teenagers can seem so hostile and full of injustice and suffering.
The sense of community experienced by fans, too, must provide a protective shield against the rest of the world and offers those within something to hold onto amidst the destabilising throes of adolescence.
Overall, I Was Born For This is a beautiful story about friendship and fandom which is as educational as it is enjoyable and effortless to read. I’ll never think about teenage fans in the same way again.
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