Unfollow Me

An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, aka Jillisblack. Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area. In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. As her pithy persona Jillisblack became an "it-voice" weighing in on all things race-based, Jill began to notice parallels between her performance of "diversity" in the white corporate world and her performance of "wokeness" for her followers. Both, she realized, were scripted. Unfollow Me is a memoir-in-essays about these scripts; it's about tokenism, micro-fame, and inhabiting spaces-real and virtual, black and white-where complicity is the price of entry. Busby's social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of white fragility (and other words for racism), respectability politics (and other words for shame), and all the places where fear masquerades as progress.

This domestic thriller is a “timely, page-turner of a novel” that examines the terrifying depths of our social media obsessions (Araminta Hall, author of Our Kind of Cruelty) You can't stop watching her. Violet Young is a hugely popular journalist-turned-mummy-influencer, with three children, a successful husband and a million subscribers on YouTube who tune in daily to watch her everyday life unfold. Until the day she's no longer there. But one day she disappears from the online world—her entire social media presence deleted overnight, with no explanation. Has she simply decided that baring her life to all online is no longer a good idea, or has something more sinister happened to Violet? But do you really know who Violet is? Her fans are obsessed with finding out the truth, but their search quickly reveals a web of lies, betrayal, and shocking consequences . . .

'An intriguing slow burner that reveals the dark side of social media' Heat 'A timely, page-turner of a novel' Araminta Hall 'Gripping, scarily realistic and unpredictable - brilliant!' Karen Hamilton 'A twisty tale' i news ********** You can't stop watching her. Violet Young is a hugely popular journalist-turned-mummy-influencer, with three children, a successful husband and a million subscribers on YouTube who tune in daily to watch her everyday life unfold. Until the day she's no longer there. But one day she disappears from the online world - her entire social media presence deleted overnight, with no explanation. Has she simply decided that baring her life to all online is no longer a good idea, or has something more sinister happened to Violet? But do you really know who Violet is? Her fans are obsessed with finding out the truth, but their search quickly reveals a web of lies, betrayal, and shocking consequences... ********** 'A total page-turner' 5* reader review 'I was completely captivated' 5* reader review 'Brilliantly addictive' 5* reader review 'Warning: once you start, you can't put it down' 5* reader review

The activist and TED speaker Megan Phelps-Roper reveals her life growing up in the most hated family in America At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy. As Phelps-Roper grew up, she saw that church members were close companions and accomplished debaters, applying the logic of predestination and the language of the King James Bible to everyday life with aplomb—which, as the church’s Twitter spokeswoman, she learned to do with great skill. Soon, however, dialogue on Twitter caused her to begin doubting the church’s leaders and message: If humans were sinful and fallible, how could the church itself be so confident about its beliefs? As she digitally jousted with critics, she started to wonder if sometimes they had a point—and then she began exchanging messages with a man who would help change her life. A gripping memoir of escaping extremism and falling in love, Unfollow relates Phelps-Roper’s moral awakening, her departure from the church, and how she exchanged the absolutes she grew up with for new forms of warmth and community. Rich with suspense and thoughtful reflection, Phelps-Roper’s life story exposes the dangers of black-and-white thinking and the need for true humility in a time of angry polarization.

After prolific growth on social media, Komal Kapoor is utilizing her perceptive understanding of romance in the digital age to present her first collection of poems. Unfollowing You tells a chronological tale of a modern love through a series of poems, prose, texts, screen grabs, and unsent letters. Exploring digital phenomena like swipe culture and technological realities, Kapoor’s words affirm experiences and sentiment echoed across many media platforms. Unfollowing You is separated into two parts: “Following You” details how the two protagonists fall in love and “Unfollowing You” shares their heartbreak. The realism of this collection will encourage readers to normalize growth and indulge in their feelings, even finding strength in them.

Based on the wildly popular Twitter feed Dear Girls Above Me, a roman à clef about how thinking like a couple of girls turned one single guy into a better man. When Charlie McDowell began sharing his open letters to his noisy upstairs neighbors—two impossibly ditzy female roommates in their mid-twenties—on Twitter, his feed quickly went viral. His followers multiplied and he got the attention of everyone from celebrities to production studios to major media outlets such as Time and Glamour. Now Dear Girls breaks out of the 140-character limit as Charlie imagines what would happen if he put the wisdom of the girls to the test. After being unceremoniously dumped by the girl he was certain was “the one,” Charlie realized his neighbors’ conversations were not only amusing, but also offered him access to a completely uncensored woman’s perspective on the world. From the importance of effectively Facebook-stalking potential girlfriends and effortlessly pulling off pastel, to learning when in the early stages of dating is too presumptuous to bring a condom and how to turn food poisoning into a dieting advantage, the girls get Charlie into trouble, but they also get him out of it—without ever having a clue of their impact on him.

If influencers have power over us, who are you allowing to influence you? In an online world obsessed with follows and likes, it’s important to consider what you’re really searching for. When you follow someone, it’s typically because you want to be like them or live like they do­–but who have you placed as your role models? In Who Are You Following? bestselling author and social media personality Sadie Robertson Huff dives deep into exploring who we are allowing to influence our daily thoughts and actions. With an excellent grasp of scriptural truths, using current research, surveys, and personal and biblical stories, Sadie draws on her own experience as a social media influencer and addresses topics such as how to go from being liked to being truly loved our true motives for fame being seen from the outside versus being known comparing ourselves to others questioning why did I post that?! how to respond to cancel culture wondering does God still love me? This book is perfect for young Christians wondering how they can live a vibrant, bold, and uncompromising life of faith in God by following the Messiah–the ultimate influencer. Discover the love, purpose, and fulfillment that is found only in Jesus.

New York Times bestselling author Dave Hollis knows what it feels like to realize you’ve been sailing off of someone else’s map. He has taken control of his life and future, and he’s ready to share the lessons he learned along the way with readers who are facing similar struggles. Dave Hollis was recently confronted with the fact that he was living the life someone else wanted for him. After weathering a highly publicized personal crisis amid the backdrop of an international pandemic and navigating the enjoyable but unpredictable waters of being a single father to four kids, he has been forced to become the captain of his own life and is ready to teach others how to do the same. Built for Courage will help you: Dive deeper into the stories, values, and beliefs you attach yourself to and decide once and for all if they have credibility or if it’s time to cut bait; Incorporate fundamental habits and routines specific to you and your circumstances that will flood your daily life with consistency, flexibility, simplicity, and integrity; Identify and, if necessary, adjust your goals to ensure they are clear, don’t belong to other people, and are not contingent on immediate results; Accept failure as the richest source of intelligence and help you reframe it as a requirement for your own progress and growth; and Much, much more. Built for Courage gleans wisdom from sources vast and wide, as well as from the life experiences of Dave himself, to get you to the place you’re meant to go and become who you are meant to be, regardless of any anchor holding you back.

From the celebrated poet, speaker, and educator comes Welcome Home, a powerful blueprint for building a strong foundation of self-worth, belonging, and happiness. “A master class in self-actualization and compassion.”—Mari Andrew, New York Times bestselling author of Am I There Yet? The powerful metaphor of home provides a structure for you to customize your journey to personal transformation as Najwa Zebian shares her own experiences in building a home within herself, and shows you how to construct the following “rooms”: • Self-Love: Learn how to build an individualized self-care routine to reflect your daily needs. • Forgiveness: Learn how to allow yourself time, reflection, and space to accept and let go of painful events. • Compassion: Discover the three different types of compassion and learn how you can let people in while maintaining boundaries. • Clarity: Learn how to remove the walls you put up around your authentic self. • Surrender: Learn how to lower your defenses and give yourself space to feel and process your emotions. • The Dream Garden: Learn how to nurture your dreams and create an authentic, original path. With practical tools, poetry, and prompts for journaling and meditation to lead to self-understanding in each chapter, Zebian shows you how to build each room in your house. Written with her trademark power, candor, and warmth, Welcome Home is an answer to the pain we all experience when we don't feel at peace with ourselves.

What Does "IRL (In Real Life)" Really Mean in Today's Digital Age? It's easy and reflexive to view our online presence as fake, to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren't living our real, offline lives. Yet so much of who we are and what we do now happens online, making it hard to know which parts of our lives are real IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness--who we are and where we fit in the world--can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social media are new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires. IRL invites readers to consider how we use the internet to fulfill the essential human need to feel real--a need many of us once met in institutions, but now seek to do on our own, online--as well as the ways we edit or curate ourselves for digital audiences. The digital search for meaning and belonging presents challenges, Stedman suggests, but also myriad opportunities to become more fully human. In the end, he makes a bold case for embracing realness in all of its uncertainty, online and off, even when it feels risky.