Review: "If You Don't Like This, I Will Die" by Lee Tilghman

If You Don't Like This, I Will Die by Lee Tilghman
Published August 2025 via Simon & Schuster
★★★

He wasn't interested in me. He was interested in the online version of me. At this point, I was still aware that those were two separate things. (loc. 1034*)

Millennials were the first generation to live our lives on the Internet, and though things have (obviously) changed quite a lot since the 90s and early 2000s, Tilghman was invested from the early days. Back then, it was AIM and LiveJournal and eventually the early days of Facebook. Instagram and TikTok weren't even on the horizon, and influencers didn't exist. But people were already in it for the clicks and the views and the followers—and it wasn't long before the landscape shifted, and Tilghman realized that her social media savvy could get her free stuff. Could earn her money. Could be a career.

Now...I understand that The Youths these days view influencing as a viable career path, the way my generation dreamed about being a musician or an athlete except perhaps without the requirement of outsize talent. I can't really imagine wanting it as a career path (the constant search for external validation from strangers on the Internet, but with the added pressure of that external validation being necessary to pay your bills), but for some still undetermined reason I'm invested in books on the topic. And so here we have a memoir by an influencer who got into it in the earliest days of influencing, who rode the high (and was often pretty miserable in the process), who fell down and got out—and then who jumped back in again. (Though I'd never heard of Tilghman until I saw this book, and it doesn't go into the "back in" part in any detail, so I'm not entirely sure what that means—fewer sponsored posts, more Substack?)

But what intrigues me more is the disconnect between 1) walking away from curating her life for an online audience and 2) writing something of a tell-all book that is basically a different curation of her life for public consumption. It's not a total disconnect—the story isn't "I shared my whole life online, learned the error of my ways, and am now sharing my whole life on paper"—but it is still kind of..."let me peel away the facade of the curated life I showed you online and show you an equally curated mess underneath". That's not entirely criticism; all memoir is curated, one way or another. Documentaries are curated. "Reality" TV is not just curated but masterminded. But I guess I'm left thinking that Tilghman clearly came away knowing how damaging her influencing career was for her (whether it would have been possible to do it in a healthier way, I don't know), but it's less clear that she's aware that her job was part of a broader problem. I'm left with the sense that if she'd been able to find a better work-life balance (and if she hadn't eventually faced backlash, albeit not about sponsored posts), she'd still be making her living from Instagram. Maybe not. Maybe still deleting comments asking for accountability, and maybe not. But either way, where does that leave us?

I'm still glad to have read the book. It aligns with some of my odder reading interests, and it does shed a certain degree of light on...well, if not necessarily the darker side of #influencerlife, then at least the sheer grind that can go into making a living from sponsored posts. Under other circumstances I might recommend it to teenagers who think that influencing is their dream job, but it's too explicit for me to actually follow through with that recommendation (Me, texting a friend: Welp, I'm 7% in and she's describing, in some detail, being pressed into giving a blow job to a guy she barely knew and getting caught by her father). It still makes for interesting reading, though—something to pick up if you're looking something simultaneously light and grim, or if you've been as equally curious and repelled as I have by the idea of a career built on "likes".

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.