Lee Tilghman’s new memoir delves into the dark, dehumanising side of the influencer industry, where people become brands and clout can mean cancellation.
To post, or not to post?
Each day, millions of people ask themselves this question, a once-innocuous inquiry that has morphed the casual (if occasionally tedious) tradition
For influencers – the backbone of an industry Goldman Sachs said was worth approximately US$250 billion ($421b) in 2024 and projects to grow to almost US$500b by 2027 – the question of posting is particularly fraught. Who owes you – in money, free product or clout? And what do you owe your followers: reliable advice? A fantasy? Your entire life?
For Lee Tilghman, known online as Lee From America, and one of the first women to build an empire-worthy Instagram following of more than 370,000 people as a wellness influencer – she is at last posting from a place of purity. “Posting has been, for me, at least since October, something I’m only doing out of my own joy,” said Tilghman, 35, speaking on a bench in Brooklyn Heights on a sweltering day in late July.
Tilghman, as the inventor of the viral smoothie bowl and peddler of philosophies and products that, when done together, she now admits were extreme, has been through the gamut of online women’s experiences. She became a celebrity followed by many but known only to a niche audience. She received free stuff from famous millennial brands – and then was paid to post about it. She invented a viral food, the aforementioned smoothie bowl. She was cancelled. She logged off forever. She logged back on, revealing a crazy new haircut, and people unfollowed her. She shared her story of feeling limited by her personal brand to such an extent that it led to an eating disorder relapse. She got a normal job. She became a deinfluencer.
And now, what has brought Tilghman back to the internet is not a brand deal, or an irresistibly pretty (and free!) vacation, but something as old school as the rotary phone: she wants you to buy her memoir. It is about her traumatic (and it is, indeed, very traumatic) years as an influencer.
It is called If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die. (Sad emoji.)
“It’s not a manifesto on whether or not you’re online,” she said. Instead, Tilghman said, it’s a book about seeing influencers beyond their one-dimensional personal brand.
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Advertise with NZME.“Most people can only handle one side of a public figure. They can’t handle a whole person. I kind of describe it as a hexagon. We’re all hexagons. We all have multiple sides, multiple facets,” she said, immaculately groomed in a Doen x Gap top, a Gap skirt embroidered with sea creatures and Tevas, a much different look than her previous wardrobe of gifted workout gear.
“But when you’re an influencer, you have to be, ‘What are you in one sentence? I am a wellness girl. I am a travel influencer. I do makeup in under five minutes. I do beach skin care. I do New England. I’m coastal granddaughter. I’m Rodeo Malibu Barbie influencer.’
“And that has not changed. The public’s necessity to have you be your elevator pitch person.”
When a woman is cancelled, Tilghman is often her first defender. “When those women went to space,” she said, referring to Lauren Sánchez and her merry band of celebrity astronauts, “I was like, ‘Guys, I don’t really care that they went to space. I’m not saying that this is the greatest thing, but why are we just so mad at women?’”
Tilghman’s book lays out the reality that being an influencer is a total bore. Being a person, whether private or public, is much more interesting. But can we see influencers as people?
“My first feeling reading it, I kind of got American Psycho vibes,” said Sean Manning, Tilghman’s editor and the publisher of Simon & Schuster. “There’s an overload of detail, one thing happening after another, the name-checking of brands, whether it’s Outdoor Voices, or Free People, or Kashi. It’s an accumulation of detail through brands, through consumerism - the attention to detail is such that she doesn’t have to editorialise too much.”
You read the running list of brands and tasks and the never-ending demands of posting – and feel empty, much as Tilghman did.
Manning was interested in the question of, “When does the character become a human being?”
Tilghman studied creative writing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and from her blog beginnings, her ability to tell a compulsively readable story was clear. Agents had approached her about book projects when she was at the peak of her Instagram powers: a recipe book, a self-care book, a self-care planner – “Lee’s Guide to Glow,” she said, “you know, that totally could have been a book”.
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Advertise with NZME.“Funnily enough,” Tilghman said, “when I stopped influencing, that’s when this book came to me.”
When she stopped influencing? Some of her detractors – including those on the parasocial but addictively readable Influencer Snarking subreddits – see Tilghman’s memoir simply as her latest #product to #promo.
“I think of it as an evolution,” she clarified. “I guess I am still influencing – 100%. I mean, that era when I was in such a routine, and it was like a channel: weekly recipes, updates, self-care tips, everything updates. I was posting on [Instagram] Stories nine times a day every day, and then three or four times on the grid per day.
“In a lot of ways, for these brands, you’re just kind of an actor. You have to act. Especially on these brand trips where you’re paid to look like you’re having a good time.”
The rollercoaster of affirmative and negative comments constantly wore on her, but so did the grind of pretending to enjoy brand trips with other influencers, in which attendees would pose together and then go back to staring at their phones, counting their likes in silence.
Tilghman’s personality is not so easily boiled down. She is a weirdo – quirky, a bit manic pixie dream girl, but with the grit of a screwball heroine. Revealing more of that side has lost her followers – more than 160,000 after she revealed a bowl haircut and weight gain following her eating disorder treatment in 2019.
Perhaps Tilghman’s realest and most relatable quality is that she loves to post. When she sold her book two years ago, she was no longer active on social media. “Every couple of months, I would maybe post something being like, I’m alive, everything’s good. But I didn’t have a purpose on there, and I was fine with that.”
The neat ending to the memoir would be to conclude social media is evil and she (and we) must never post again. “I believe that social media isn’t going anywhere. Technology is not going anywhere,” she said.
Tilghman considered not using social media to promote her book. After all, she had gone viral for leaving Instagram in 2023 and was afraid that followers would criticise her for reneging on her promise to “de-influence”. But then she realised, “You know what? I’ve spent so much time on this book. I’m going to do everything I can to make this book a super success. I’m going to use my audience that gave me this book deal. They are a big part of the story.
“The biggest difference is that I don’t have a manager or agent on my phone saying, ‘Hey, have you posted the stories?’ … It’s just on me.”
The shift in algorithms from a feed ordered by the time of posts to a discovery-based algorithm that surfaces content by mysterious means has given us much more anxiety around sharing online, said Rachel Karten, a social media consultant. “There wasn’t this jet-fuelled algorithm that exists today” when Tilghman was influencing. “The algorithms now can turn anyone into an influencer overnight.
“There’s a certain level of cringe to posting,” Karten continued. “Because of the way the algorithm works, it makes it seem like you’re trying to become an influencer, even if you’re just innocuously posting or sharing vacation photos, because that’s the way that [influencing] starts now.”
It may be hard to understand how someone could have such anxiety around putting a video or picture of themselves online, but Tilghman, as she writes about in her book, was one of the first women to have the influencer economy turn on her.
In 2018, Tilghman announced a three-hour workshop to her followers with “cooking tutorials for pumpkin fat balls and creamy coconut butter adaptogenic drinks, seminars on mindful eating and Ayurvedic practices, tips on cultivating true self-love and self-care and so much more that I don’t cover online,” she said in a video revealing the event. Tickets would start at US$350, with a VIP option of US$650. Within five minutes, the criticisms began pouring in: that this was “ludicrous freelancer capitalism,” “You are NOT spreading inclusivity,” “A white girl doing a workshop inspired by matcha (Japanese) and ayurveda (Indian) and charging $350???? This workshop is for white people.”
Tilghman brought on a crisis PR consultant to navigate the fallout, but the confluence of the criticism and her growing awareness that her obsession with wellness had led to an eating disorder relapse led her to leave the platform the following summer.
The morning of our interview, the entrepreneur behind Outdoor Voices, Ty Haney, said that she was rejoining her brand Outdoor Voices, which helped transform chic-leggings-and-little-sexy-top workout wear into the go-to uniform for millennial women running errands. (Haney was ousted in 2020 following accusations of poor leadership.) Earlier in the summer, Audrey Gelman, who was similarly pushed out of her co-working space The Wing in 2020, re-entered the fray with a small, ornately decorated inn in Upstate New York called The Six Bells.
And now, Tilghman is returning with her own project. Does she feel a part of a cohort of cancelled woman making a comeback? “Oh my god! I don’t know, but if that’s what you’re saying, then that’s really nice,” she said. “Whether or not it’s similar stories as theirs, and potentially it is – it’s so funny, I remember in 2020, everyone was like, ‘Ty Haney is so problematic.’ And then last week, when there was this buzz that she might be buying back Outdoor Voices, everyone’s like, ‘We want Ty back!’ And again, I’m just like, huh. You guys were all so mean to her and now you miss her? Same with Audrey.”
She thought for a few more minutes. “When we see a woman get too powerful – and when it’s women seeing other women get way too powerful – we can’t handle it. We have to take them down because it’s like a threat to us. We don’t see it as like, ‘Oh wow, if they’ve done it, I can do it too.’
“Because to be honest, there are limited spots for women to gain power. It’s already hard enough for people. And so it really threatens us when a woman is gaining power too. And I get it, like I was very competitive. I still am. I just don’t let that competition eat me alive, because it can eat you alive.”
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