eye opening look at influencer culture and how toxic it can oftentimes be. i do feel like i wanted/needed more later in the timeline, and at points it does feel like she isn't taking full accountability, but this book was a quick and fun read. 4 stars. tysm for the arc.

I let this one sit for a few days after finishing and I'm still not completely sure how I feel about it. For starters, I couldn't put this down - I read it in two sittings and found a lot of value in what Lee had to say. While the beginning of her memoir brought back a lot of early 00s internet nostalgia (the away status hierarchy is REAL!), it reminded me that it was only the tip of the iceberg of the dangers of social media. Lee was very honest, raw, and relatable in her social media pressures of validation that led to an eating disorder, broken relationships, and feeling lost in life - that is something we can ALL connect with in some way or another. As we live in a world that relies so heavily on digital connection, it's imperative that we monitor our patterns not only for ourselves, but for the generations that we are currently raising.

That being said, there's something that didn't quite sit well with me. I don't know if it was the writing or Lee herself, but it felt a little scattered. Some topics she'd dive deeply into while skimming over others that felt equally, if not more, important. Because of that, it felt incomplete or if she was maybe hiding something? I don't know - maybe it's just me. Overall, it was an enjoyable read that a few editing tweaks could have really taken to the top. Thanks so much for the ARC!

If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die is a sharp, funny, and disarmingly honest memoir that explores the strange intimacy of internet fame. I loved the way she reflected on the gradual takeover of tech in her life, starting with nostalgic AIM chats and slowly evolving into a full-time existence online. As a millennial, I could relate to her exact journey from AIM, to Tumblr, to Instagram and so on. Her perspective feels refreshingly self-aware, especially as someone who remembers following many of these early influencers during their meteoric (and often chaotic) rise to fame.

Lee doesn’t try to glamorize her journey. She leans into the awkwardness, the obsession with validation, and the emotional toll that being constantly “on” can take. The book balances humor and heartbreak with ease, and her candid voice makes it feel like you’re talking to a friend who’s finally ready to spill the whole story. I felt like she was very honest, even if it was at times unflattering. I finished this book in a few hours and couldn’t put it down.

As one of the OG @leefromamerica followers I was dying to get my hands on this book. And it didn’t disappoint. This is a very frank and honest look at the personal toll that social media, and a social media career, can take on a person. It wasn’t just the negative comments, or keeping up with brand deals, or having to post every moment of your life, or making and eating only the “healthiest” foods. It’s all of it. This perfect storm that can destroy a person from the inside out.

Lee does not come off as likeable in this book. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? This is a woman no longer concerned with likability above authenticity. I appreciated that she admitted that social media will always be a part of her job. That its what she knows to do. The acknowledgment that a life without social media wouldn’t be sustainable for her was real.

This is an extremely quick read and anyone interested in what influencing looks like behind the scenes will find something here to enjoy. I read the book in one day. It was impossible to put down.

My one big criticism is the lack of accountability from Lee. Not only did the content she post hurt her, it hurt many others. She promoted disordered eating and pseudo science and never acknowledges in this book how that was harmful and something she chose to do for profit. The way she talks about some of her healthy habits still seems like someone who doesn’t see the harm behind them. And any mention of white privilege or cultural appropriation was glazed over so quickly it felt clear Lee has still not dug into how she was complicit in that.

But ultimately, I did enjoy this. It’s a very quick read and I feel like I better understand how influencers are working behind the scenes.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

A raw, messy, fascinating look behind the influencer curtain.

I followed LeeFromAmerica during peak wellness Instagram, during the matcha, the Outdoor Voices sets, the adaptogens, and I remember all of it. The breakup. The bowl cut. The backlash. I picked up this book partly out of nostalgia, partly out of curiosity... and wow, I was not expecting how dark and deeply personal it got.

Lee’s memoir isn’t just about influencing, but it’s also about identity, disordered eating, trauma, addiction, and the high cost of constant self-performance. She pulls back the curated veil on a life that, at one point, looked aspirational to me. What I thought was just clean eating and #selfcare turned out to be deeply toxic. Not just for her, but for the community watching and mimicking it.

As an avid social media user, I view this as a thoughtful cautionary tale about how easily your self-worth can get tangled up in likes and validation. Social media can be creative and connective, but this book is proof of what happens when it becomes your entire identity.

That said, the book itself is uneven. At times it tells more than it shows, and some of the deeper issues are dropped in quickly, then abandoned. I wish a stronger editor had helped shape the narrative. Still, I read it in a few hours because it’s compulsively scrollable, just like her feed used to be.

Whether you followed Lee back in the day or are simply interested in influencer culture and the cost of digital fame, this is a compelling, sometimes uncomfortable read that raises essential questions, especially for anyone raising kids in a world where being an influencer is now a career goal.

Thank you to NetGalley, Lee Tilghman, and Simon & Schuster for the eARC of this book.

I am fascinated by influencers if only to understand why my 8 year old wants to do it. I may make her read this book when she’s older as a cautionary tale. I learned a lot about how much I social media can be a good thing but also a very toxic place to live in for too long.

I followed LeeFromAmerica in my late 20s and early 30s, before influencer culture really took off. I bought the matcha, the smoothies, the Outdoor Voices sets. I remember her breakup, her Tokyo trip, the bowl cut, the backlash, the hiatus. I picked this up out of curiosity but didn’t expect such a dark, raw account and not just of her influencer life, but of her deeper struggles with identity, control, eating disorders, and addiction. It’s a powerful look at the toxicity of the wellness world and the real harm social media personas can cause to themselves and others. Whether or not you agree with her choices, this book is a cautionary tale about how addictive and damaging influencer and even wellness culture can be, even when it looks like sunrise yoga and adaptogens with collagen powder. It’s a good read for anyone who followed her or came of age during Instagram’s wellness boom and especially for parents of preteen or teen girls.

Oof. Well, I’ll give her one thing — she is VERY GOOD at her job. This book was incredibly scrollable. I read it on my phone in a few hours rather than perusing my Instagram feed.

I was actually really excited to get this arc. I enjoyed Lee From America’s Instagram content quite a bit when I was diagnosed with PCOS in 2017, and I felt bad for her when it was clear the influencing pressure of living in public had gotten to her.

But this book… is not good. It tells instead of shows, and it offers salacious details about her life in a super-clinical fashion. Like, she’d drop full paragraphs hinting at abuse, then quickly pivot to a different topic. I don’t need to read the gory details, but the whole book was surface level.

I feel like this could’ve benefited from a different editor… someone who would’ve encouraged lee to tease out the important stories in a way that made me care about her as a person. Because again, I did at one point care about her in a parasocial way — and I left this book thinking the real author might actually be a caricature of what she was before her big rise and fall.

Maybe that’s the point? Maybe she wants to drive a huge wedge between her previous lifestyle brand and what we think of her today.

As much as I love the title, I’m so sorry to say… I do not like the actual book. Please don’t die, though. I’m a stranger on the internet and my opinion does NOT matter.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

I received a copy for review. All opinions are my own. What an eye opening look at the real experience of being an influencer and how toxic and intoxicating it can become. While I knew somewhat how it all worked on the backend it was fascinating to hear it first hand with brutal honesty. Lee’s memoir will hopefully be the first of many overtime because this shows how important it is to be honest and to let people know things aren’t always as they seem on social media. While we hear that a lot, this book was proof of how true that is.

"He wasn't interested in me. He was interested in the online version of me. At this point, I was still aware that those were two separate things." (loc. 1034*)

Millennials were the first generation to live our lives on the Internet, and though things have (obviously) changed quite a lot since the 90s and early 2000s, Tilghman was invested from the early days. Back then, it was AIM and LiveJournal and eventually the early days of Facebook. Instagram and TikTok weren't even on the horizon, and influencers didn't exist. But people were already in it for the clicks and the views and the followers—and it wasn't long before the landscape shifted, and Tilghman realized that her social media savvy could get her free stuff. Could earn her money. Could be a career.

Now...I understand that The Youths these days view influencing as a viable career path, the way my generation dreamed about being a musician or an athlete except perhaps without the requirement of outsize talent. I can't really imagine *wanting* it as a career path (the constant search for external validation from strangers on the Internet, but with the added pressure of that external validation being necessary to pay your bills), but for some still undetermined reason I'm invested in books on the topic. And so here we have a memoir by an influencer who got into it in the earliest days of influencing, who rode the high (and was often pretty miserable in the process), who fell down and got out—and then who jumped back in again. (Though I'd never heard of Tilghman until I saw this book, and it doesn't go into the "back in" part in any detail, so I'm not entirely sure what that means—fewer sponsored posts, more Substack?)

But what intrigues me more is the disconnect between 1) walking away from curating her life for an online audience and 2) writing something of a tell-all book that is basically a different curation of her life for public consumption. It's not a total disconnect—the story isn't "I shared my whole life online, learned the error of my ways, and am now sharing my whole life on paper"—but it is still kind of..."let me peel away the facade of the curated life I showed you online and show you an equally curated mess underneath". That's not entirely criticism; *all* memoir is curated, one way or another. Documentaries are curated. "Reality" TV is not just curated but masterminded. But I guess I'm left thinking that Tilghman clearly came away knowing how damaging her influencing career was for her (whether it would have been possible to do it in a healthier way, I don't know), but it's less clear that she's aware that her job was part of a broader problem. I'm left with the sense that if she'd been able to find a better work-life balance (and if she hadn't eventually faced backlash, albeit not about sponsored posts), she'd still be making her living from Instagram. Maybe not. Maybe still deleting comments asking for accountability, and maybe not. But either way, where does that leave us?

I'm still glad to have read the book. It aligns with some of my odder reading interests, and it does shed a certain degree of light on...well, if not necessarily the darker side of #influencerlife, then at least the sheer *grind* that can go into making a living from sponsored posts. Under other circumstances I might recommend it to teenagers who think that influencing is their dream job, but it's too explicit for me to actually follow through with that recommendation (Me, texting a friend: "Welp, I'm 7% in and she's describing, in some detail, being pressed into giving a blow job to a guy she barely knew and getting caught by her father"). It still makes for interesting reading, though—something to pick up if you're looking something simultaneously light and grim, or if you've been as equally curious and repelled as I have by the idea of a career built on "likes".

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

If You Don't Like This, I Will Die joins a growing body of work recounting influencer life in the early 2000s. A quick read and easily digestible, this book will find an audience with the author's followers/fans and those interested in influencer memoirs - plus those who enjoy to hate-read.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for my opinion.

Okay. So. I thought this was a very strongly written book, especially compared with some other influencers’ books I’ve read. I followed Lee back when she was on the Glowing Up podcast, and I witnessed her “cancellation” in real time. I didn’t have any strong feelings on her either way at the time. I enjoyed most of the book and read it in one sitting. I especially loved the first part when she was young and going into the “computer room” - it was incredibly nostalgic and relatable.

She lost me a bit when she wrote about the incident that led to her getting off the Internet. She kiiiiinda takes accountability but not really, and it seemed like she was still trying to put the blame on her assistant. I don’t think she gets it even to this day. That being said, I was still ready to give the book 4 stars. But then I looked at her current social media. Mistake on my part. Lee doesn’t get it, doesn’t want to take responsibility for any of the unhealthy things she promoted, and just comes off very poorly while promoting her book, which is a very baffling choice to me. I am giving the book 3 stars because it was enjoyable and quick to read and the writing was great.

I really wanted to like this book.

While it is not horrible and the subject matter is quite interesting, I found the story dragged A LOT. It made it hard to care about the story.

I managed to read about half the book and then gave up,

📸✨ “If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die” by @leefromamerica is one of the most raw, eye-opening memoirs I’ve ever read. 💔🔌

Once a top wellness influencer with 400k followers and six-figure sponsorships 💵🌱, Lee was living the curated dream… but offline, she was crumbling. This book pulls back the filter and lays bare the mental toll of being always on. The performative pressure. The disordered eating. The burnout masked by #selfcare. The deep unraveling of identity behind the algorithm.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the expectation to be liked, this one’s for you. 🫠💭 A deeply personal and timely reflection on internet culture, influencer capitalism, and what it means to reclaim your humanity.

💬 Add this to your nonfiction/memoir TBR ASAP.

🧠 TW: disordered eating, mental health crisis, institutionalization

⭐️ Out 8.12.25 from @simonandschuster

#IfYouDontLikeThisIWillDie #LeeTilghman #InfluencerMemoir #Bookstagram #MemoirRecommendation #NonfictionReads #SocialMediaDetox #MentalHealthMatters #WellnessCulture #BookRelease #MustReadMemoir #BooksOfInstagram #Bookstagrammer #BookRecs #AugustBooks #RealTalkReads #ContentCreationCrisis #BurnoutRecovery #DigitalWellness #InfluencerLifeExposed

I was an OG follower of @leefromamerica starting around 2015. I vividly remember so many of Lee's life events, brand partnerships, and health experiments, so reading If You Don't Like This, I Will Die was very nostalgic. It's hard to read how much she was struggling and how few things in her life were truly bringing her joy. I expected nothing less than the honest truth from Lee, though, and I can't believe how many things I am already rethinking about my own social media use. I think some parts of the book could have been left out in favor of diving deeper into others. For example, the emotional and physical abuse Lee experienced at home clearly impacted her, but we didn't learn much more after the chapter about her sister's birthday. I can understand wanting to keep some things private, so I think this could have been omitted and that space focused on other things.

Lee Tilghman’s memoir offers a revealing, sometimes raw glimpse into the highs and lows of life as a wellness influencer. Known to many as @LeeFromAmerica, she built an online empire on self-care, clean eating, and aesthetic living. From brand deals with Madewell and Subaru to raking in over $300,000 a year, her life on Instagram seemed polished and perfect.

But as she openly confesses, the curated image came at a cost. Behind every photo was a moment missed, a friendship strained, and a mind unraveling. Her obsession with “content” blurred the lines between life and performance, leading to disordered eating, mental health struggles, and eventually, a complete identity crisis. The memoir documents her descent into burnout and her journey toward self-rediscovery after stepping away from the influencer lifestyle.

While the writing can be uneven and sometimes leans into generalizations, the story is honest and timely. It’s a thought-provoking account of the emotional toll of performing online, especially as influencer culture becomes increasingly normalized. This book is a strong pick for readers interested in digital culture, wellness discourse, or the hidden cost of chasing online validation.