The Atmospherians: A Novel

I drifted into a reverie of isolation.

“Be more specific, Blair. That’s what I’m always telling the men: Be. Specific. They hide in the ams and the abs and the eves: ambiguity, abstractions, evasions.”

These men didn’t know desperation. They knew inconvenience, annoyance, frustration. They were not hopeless, and perhaps they didn’t need to be. Even more than direction, hopelessness required convincing.

When Dyson said, Show me how to have a body like yours, what I heard was: Show me how to internalize the expectations of magazines and commercials and lip-licking men in the street. Show me how to obsess over myself. To hate myself. To see my body as something both valuable and worthless, something constantly under construction. That was, I believe

I needed the money. Who didn’t need money? And plenty of people far duller than me were cashing in on beauty tutorials. Starting a regimen was one of the last remaining ways to make good money, to be your own boss—to help people, to share what I knew with the world. And I knew far more than most skin-care influencers—though influencer was not yet a