45 pages • 1-hour read
Julie Chan Is Dead
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Chapters 11-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Chapter 11 Summary
Julie spends the night in a hotel and awakens to messages from Chloe’s publicist, Fiona (contacting her on Chloe’s phone). A video of Julie reacting to the horror of finding a dead body has gone viral.
Chapter 12 Summary
Julie returns Fiona’s calls; Fiona readily assumes that she is Chloe. Julie explains the same story: She unexpectedly found “Julie’s” body in her apartment; Fiona is mostly concerned with protecting Julie/Chloe’s public image. She mentions the invitation that Chloe has received to attend an event that evening, hosted by Bella Marie (a highly successful model and influencer). Even though she is worried that people will detect her true identity, Julie agrees to go.
Chapter 13 Summary
Julie posts a statement that Fiona has ghostwritten: “Chloe” explains that the video was posted without her consent and depicted her in a moment of raw grief over the loss of her sister.
Chapter 14 Summary
Julie/Chloe receives an outpouring of support from her many fans and followers. Julie goes back to Chloe’s apartment and confronts the neighbor who filmed her. He agrees to take the video down but alludes to “another one of your tantrums” (56), implying that Chloe was acting erratically in the lead-up to her death.
Chapter 15 Summary
Fiona arrives at the apartment; she accepts Julie’s new identity as Chloe but seems puzzled by her strange behavior. Fiona is dropping off a dress that Chloe had planned to wear, but Julie is panicked because the dress is slightly too small for her.
Chapter 16 Summary
Julie is able to fit into the dress. She has also prepared to meet the circle of influencers who will be at the event. Bella Marie has a close circle of friends known as the “Belladonnas” and becoming part of this circle typically has a very positive impact on someone’s career as an influencer. Julie suspects that Chloe was planning to attend an annual trip with the Belladonnas, but when she tries to get details from Fiona, Fiona explains that Chloe never told her anything about the trip.
Chapter 17 Summary
Julie arrives at the event and meets an influencer named Angelique, who readily mistakes her for Chloe. This pattern continues as Julie interacts with the other influencers at the event; she can’t help noticing how shallow and self-absorbed they are. Julie becomes concerned when she realizes she is seated next to Bella Marie, even though she was not aware that Chloe and Bella were particularly close.
Chapter 18 Summary
Bella is beautiful and charismatic; she seems to know a lot about the death of Chloe/Julie’s sister and treats Julie very warmly. However, Julie can sense tension and jealousy amongst the circle of women clustered around Bella. Several also comment on being surprised that she seems to be grief stricken since she was known to dislike her twin sister.
Chapter 19 Summary
Isla, one of the newer influencers befriended by Bella Marie, chats with Julie and seems warmer and more genuine than the others. Isla explains how becoming an influencer genuinely benefited her and helped her to achieve financial stability and leave an abusive relationship. Julie is unable to get any of the other Belladonnas to confirm anything about the upcoming trip. She does learn that she is scheduled to attend a fashionable workout class the next day.
Chapter 20 Summary
Back home, Julie explores the social media presences of the different women from the party. She is surprised to find that Chloe has muted these feeds. Julie is also genuinely touched by a group chat in which the women have sent messages of care and support to Chloe in the wake of her sister’s death. She is surprised to receive a phone call to her old phone—that is, the phone where someone would contact Julie, not the phone where they would contact Chloe.
Chapter 21 Summary
Julie realizes she has several missed calls and voice messages from her aunt. She presumes her aunt has been notified of her supposed death, so she is confused why her aunt would be calling the phone of someone believed to be dead. When Julie listens to the voicemails, they are garbled but lead her to believe that her aunt somehow knows she is still alive and impersonating Chloe. Julie becomes increasingly anxious about what she has done.
Chapter 22 Summary
When Julie wakes up the next morning, she focuses on enjoying the luxuries of her new life. She realizes that something as simple as posting a photo of herself in a certain brand of clothing can earn her money through affiliate links.
Chapter 23 Summary
Although the workout class involves some people commenting on how Julie seems different from Chloe, she leaves the class elated and confident. She finds the support she receives from her followers and fellow influencers to be invigorating.
Chapter 24 Summary
Julie calls her aunt, hoping to convince her that she, Julie, is in fact Chloe. However, her aunt is aware of her true identity and knows that Chloe is the one who died. She demands money and the deed to Julie’s house in exchange for keeping this information quiet. Julie’s aunt also records the conversation, so Julie is now in a very incriminating position: Her aunt even implies that Julie may have killed Chloe to steal her identity. Julie agrees to pay her aunt more than a million dollars in exchange for keeping her secret.
Chapters 11-24 Analysis
Julie’s new identity pulls her into the orbit of Bella Marie and the Belladonnas. This cast of characters allows Zhang to satirize influencer culture, depicting the various women as shallow, vapid, and self-obsessed and critiquing the culture that fuels them as one driven by envy, consumerism, and illusory parasocial relationships. While the world of influencers may seem to be empowering in that it offers the opportunity for women (historically a demographic that earns less than men) to earn significant incomes without any specialized education or training, Zhang makes it clear that the female influencers depicted in the novel are commodifying their appearance, and in fact reaffirming the prioritization and fetishization of feminine beauty norms. Because the women have who achieved the most success in this field are thin, beautiful, white women, the Belladonnas reflect The Pernicious Influence of Unearned Privilege.
Initially, the Belladonnas seem like an opportunity for female mentorship, emotional support, and mutual empowerment. Novels such as Rebecca Wells’s The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (explicitly alluded to later in the plot) and Ann Brashares’s Sisterhood of The Travelling Pants have often presented circles of female friendship as sources of community and support, but the Belladonnas are cast in a sinister light from the beginning. The name “Belladonna” literally translates to beautiful woman in Italian (emphasizing the value of their outward appearance) but is also an alternative name for the poisonous plant known as deadly nightshade. Historical women such as Lucrezia Borgia and the Roman Empress Livia have been associated with poisoning their enemies, forging an association with women and poison (in the case of Livia, sources accuse her of using belladonna specifically to murder her son). Belladonna may also have been used for cosmetic purposes to dilate pupils and create a fashionable, wide-eyed appearance at different times in history. Thus, the name of the group alludes to a sinister capacity for female violence and the overlap between beauty and toxicity.
Poison is a recurring motif throughout the novel: Julie is likely drugged during her time on the island, explaining her strange euphoria, and Bella Marie killed Chloe by facilitating a fatal drug overdose. The motif of poison also reflects the toxic influence of social media: Individuals voluntarily consume it without realizing how it is gradually damaging them. The motif is furthered in a series of scenes where a kind of grotesque group consumption occurs. At the very first party that Julie attends, she is left uneasy as she watches the women consume rare venison with “scarlet-stained lips, teeth bloody from the rare meat” (82). When Julie tries to eat her own meat, there is a “metallic tang spurting into my throat, coating my tongue with gamey iron” (83). The visceral and grotesque imagery of the scene contrasts with the often-ethereal public personas of the influencers and alludes to darker and more sinister elements: it also foreshadows the scene where Julie will be pressured to consume a live baby mouse. These motifs of literal consumption symbolize the commodification and consumption of image and identity on social media, suggesting that content creators and their followers alike get metaphorically eaten up, losing individuality and integrity along the way.
The introduction of the Belladonnas, and Bella Marie in particular, also develops the theme of The Need for Love and Belonging. Even though she can sense worrying dynamics amidst the group of women, Julie can’t help longing for their acceptance. After Chloe’s death, the possibility of a reunion between the sisters is foreclosed forever, leaving Julie longing for family and sisterhood. This longing makes her particularly vulnerable to the toxic dynamics of the Belladonnas.
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