Lee Tilghman wants you to know she’s finished being an influencer.
Once known as @leefromamerica, she spent years churning out meticulously aesthetic smoothie bowls, videos of her morning routines, and aspirational wellness content for nearly 400,000 followers until the whole enterprise collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. She was canceled in 2018 for the crime of raising her prices for a workshop she was putting on, an unpardonable sin in a world where followers imagine themselves as shareholders in your life. The backlash was swift. The shame was consuming. And under the pressure, her half-managed eating disorder came roaring back. Tilghman disappeared from Instagram, leaving the cult she had cultivated to feast on her absence.
But now she has returned—not to influencing, she insists, but to literature. Her memoir, If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die, is meant to be a reckoning. In practice, it is something murkier: a confessional so compulsively readable it proves she hasn’t left the stage at all.
The book begins with Lee’s introduction to the internet. “My life online officially started the day I was twelve and my father brought home a large box from Best Buy,” she writes. From there, it all starts to unravel. We are taken through the next decade of internet-induced drama, beginning when she was 15 and her father walked in on her performing a sex act on a boyfriend she got in an online chatroom. It’s a shocking opener, daring you to look away while ensuring that you won’t. From there the disclosures come steadily, almost gleefully: a cocaine habit picked up at Dimes, a doomed love affair with a Swedish boyfriend, the rituals of bingeing and purging, the mounting realization that her obsession with posting made her a terrible daughter, an unreliable friend, a selfish partner, and a disinterested stepmother.
Tilghman is not interested in making herself look good. She is interested in making you keep reading. And you do, because she understands what every influencer understands: that intimacy, even ugly intimacy, sells.
If this sounds extreme, it fits the broader moment when the wellness world itself is cracking apart. Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar, which dramatizes the Belle Gibson scandal, is the perfect parable. Gibson, you’ll remember, was the Instagram wellness guru who faked terminal brain cancer and claimed to have cured it with diets and “natural remedies.” She sold cookbooks, launched an app, and pocketed donations that never reached their charities, all on the promise that self-care was salvation. Apple cider vinegar, it turns out, erodes teeth, wrecks the gut, and masks disordered eating under the guise of wellness. It’s a metaphor for the whole ecosystem Tilghman helped build. The products don’t heal, but corrode.
There is something perversely admirable about the way Tilghman embraces her own monstrosity. She doesn’t flinch from recounting the nights she neglected people who loved her, the meals ruined by her fixation on how they’d play on Instagram, the casual cruelty inflicted on those unlucky enough to compete with her need to document every moment. She remembers a trip to Japan with her mother that she ruined because she was fixated on finding a green apple to eat when the hotel breakfast was only offering red ones. She details her sister’s wedding, where multiple family members had to beg her to shave her armpits before they had photos taken—Tilghman didn’t want to let down her followers by conforming to societal expectations of women, of course. The honesty is raw and enraging, but it is also strategic. Instagram runs on aspiration, on the performance of perfection. Memoirs run on ruin. Tilghman knows how to feed an audience, and she knows that ruin, served in lavish detail, tastes just as good as kale to a wellness nut.
The paradox at the center of the book is that it pretends to mark an ending, even as it demonstrates a continuation. Tilghman insists she has walked away from the influencer treadmill. But quitting influencing by writing a memoir about quitting influencing is like an alcoholic just having a few drinks at Christmas. Tilghman has not left the performance behind, she’s just rebranded. Instead of selling wellness hacks, she is selling the story of her own destruction. Her medium has changed, but the need to narrate remains the same.
At times, she seems aware of the irony. She recalls with unease the way her followers once resembled a cult, then admits that she herself played high priestess, dispensing guidance to thousands who thought a better life could be achieved with the right vitamin supplement. She sees the absurdity of it now, yet even in exposing the absurdity, she cannot quite stop. There are still Substack essays, still the occasional self-consciously ironic Instagram post about how ridiculous it all was, and still this book, the longest post of her life. She continues to package herself, to monetize her disclosures, to feed an audience.
The result is a memoir that is almost unbearably intimate and yet deeply familiar, because we already know this genre. We’ve seen it before in other influencer-to-writer pivots, in the great migration of online personalities who renounce the grid only to reappear as critics of the grid. Caroline Calloway’s Scammer comes to mind. The story is always the same: The influencer claims to have been consumed by the machine, insists she has broken free, and then proves, by the very act of telling us this, that she is still inside it.
That is why the book is so good. It’s messy, it’s grotesque, it’s full of sex and cocaine and shame and selfishness. But it’s also impossible to put down, because Tilghman has mastered the confession: how to make yourself look terrible in a way that makes people love you more. Tilghman’s book is gripping precisely because she cannot resist oversharing. She tells you everything, even things that damage her image—like how she stole gift cards from a brand she was working with—because damaging your image is the most authentic thing you can do when it’s all you have.
If her old content was a smoothie bowl, pristine and curated, her new content is the mess left in the sink afterward. And if you’re still reading, still clicking, still buying, then she has done the thing she swore she wouldn’t do anymore: She has influenced you.
To read If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die is to confront the bleak reality that once you have built an identity on constant posting, you cannot really stop. You can delete your account, renounce your sponsors, and denounce the cult of wellness you helped create, but the performance continues in another form, like writing a book for Simon & Schuster. She left Instagram, but she didn’t leave us. She is still performing, still confessing, still curating her life into consumable form. She is, in the end, still influencing—only now in hardcover.
If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die: An Influencer Memoir
by Lee Tilghman
Simon & Schuster, 240 pp., $29
Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
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