Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

The novel draws attention to the conflict between online identities and lived realities, especially focusing on how social media encourages disconnection from the self. Aimes’s breakdown when she is unable to get the perfect shot of her coffee exemplifies this: She admits that she does not even like the particular matcha-coffee blend she has ordered, “but straight coffee doesn’t get as many likes as a swirly, multi-colored drink, so here she is” (56). She ordered it specifically for its Instagram appeal, and her decision to prioritize the drink’s aesthetics over its taste highlights her need to distort her reality to fit an online ideal, creating a schism between her online and offline selves. The wider this grows, the more unsettled and anxious Aimes feels. For instance, she notes that she has a table lamp in the shape of a hand that she hates. Yet, she keeps the lamp around because her followers love stories featuring the piece of décor. Aimes has to suppress her natural revulsion for the artefact to maintain her online self. The lamp, which she compares to “having someone’s severed hand on [her] nightstand” (108) is a symbol of the emotional cost of Aimes’s online persona that she maintains by ignoring her true self.