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Julia Argy’s debut novel, The One, skewers popular culture’s twin obsessions with reality television and romantic love. Recently fired from her corporate job and without anything better to do, our protagonist Emily auditions for the novel’s eponymous reality dating show. Over the next 10 weeks, she competes among 30 women for the affections of the “blandly hot” lead. Meanwhile, the show’s producer Miranda has decided that Emily has the best shot to win and, in the hopes of getting ahead of her fellow producers, coaches Emily on how to perform for the camera. As Emily’s relationship with another contestant evolves and Miranda’s on-screen narrative comes to fruition, Emily is forced to untangle who she really is from the show’s perception of her.
I spoke with Argy about the allure of reality dating shows, the complexities of desire, and our culture of surveillance.
Jeanette Lestina: You were inspired to write The One after bingeing reality dating shows during the start of the pandemic. What is it about these shows that intrigues you so much, and what has your relationship with them been since writing this novel?
Julia Argy: I’d watched them before the pandemic started but not quite with such attentive eye. When the pandemic started, I was watching The Bachelor; Love Island UK, which is like a full-time job, so many episodes every week; and Love is Blind. I was inundated by the content and the weird ways they play off each other, and I was in a lull in my own writing where I was like, “I don’t really have a project that’s calling me, and this type of media is really captivating to me.”
I wanted to explore why so many people watched these types of shows that are super bizarre and not super well-respected. Succession came back last night, and everyone was so pleased. It’s very renowned in different circles, and no one is embarrassed to say, “I watch Succession.” But with reality dating shows, there’s this constant stigma that it’s stupid, it’s not super rigorous, it’s just light and fun. But they’re obviously able to hold millions of people’s attention; even though they’re so similar, people keep churning out new ones. It felt like really rich ground to start exploring both what reality dating shows are doing to us as a culture but also just as a good, interesting setting for a book that also explores other issues. I feel like the questions I was grappling with—wondering why I was so interested in watching—were answered in writing the book.
It also seemed like a really easy entry point to start, writing from a place that had a lot of personal interest to me. It seemed like I knew certainly enough about it to put my foot in the door. I watched a lot, read a lot. I had to figure out a lot of behind of behind-the-scenes stuff, so I’m definitely not an expert and made a lot of stuff up—as a fiction writer is privileged to do.
JL: The One offers a lot of criticism of these shows. Do you think there’s anything redeeming or worthwhile in them?
JA: They’re obviously enormously entertaining, and that, I think, is part of their longevity. That seems like they’ve gotten something down at least, that they can capture people’s attention. I think the criticism you see in the book is a structural criticism that isn’t necessarily just at reality television. I think reality television is something that has come out of a larger cultural and economic system that has allowed these shows to thrive, and I think it’s really interesting to think about how that has changed since the beginning of these shows. People’s media presences have gotten so much more intense since these shows have started that they’ve almost taken on a new life of their own as a little platform for people to start careers on social media. And people have been very successful at doing so. There are fully-funded lifestyles from going on one of these reality television shows regardless of whether they find love. I think the criticism that’s there is talking about the shows as part of our larger cultural institution rather than “These shows are so silly. Why does anyone watch them?” I watch them! I can’t be that mean about it because I was totally enthralled by them, and I think they’re fascinating. If I were to be too critical, I would just be putting myself down.
JL: The main character, Emily, is very preoccupied with how others perceive her, especially with the anticipation of having a TV audience. How do you handle those thoughts of having an audience as you write?
JA: There was this funny moment when I was like, “Oh, someone’s going to read this book one day, and I’m going to have to process that on a personal level.” Obviously, it’s my debut novel, so I hadn’t experienced that before. People in my MFA program and my friends have read my work before, but it was never going to be this public thing. And I was like, “Oh, is this a little bit of personal processing for me—writing this book about what people are going to think?”
But she, I think, is potentially an amazing candidate to be on a reality TV show or the worst person possible to go on one because she’s so obsessed with what other people will think of her, how she’ll be perceived, what people will think her motivations are. It’s not just that she’s curious about it; she’s obsessed with pleasing people. She’s desperate to be liked. And I don’t think in the book she comes off all that likeably, and I think it’s up for debate as to whether, in the imagined show, she comes off all that likeably. I think, ultimately, it’s a failed mission for her to control what other people think of her. I think Emily certainly figures that out by the end of the book, and that’s part of her character arc. That was mostly what I was thinking about while I was writing beyond my “Is this subliminal messaging that I’m doing for myself?” But I wasn’t as worried about it as Emily was, that’s for sure.
JL: As you mentioned, this is your debut novel. What’s been your favorite part of writing and publishing it?
JA: You hear stories about people writing books for decades, and it takes a really long time and is a really big effort. I wrote my book in a much shorter period. I had never finished a project and had it be published in a way where I was like, “I’m done with this, and now someone else is going to help me make this better.” And I’m no longer just toiling away at this on my laptop; it becomes a bigger communal project. I have my agent, my editors helping me. I have a publicity team. I have a marketing team. And they’re all really excited about the book, so it’s very strange to have something that exists on your Word document become something that other people are so excited about getting into the world for so much of the writing process. It’s like this could really not work at all, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen with this. So transitioning over to it being a group project—notoriously group projects are terrible and no one likes them, but I had a great experience with the group project of publishing this book. And it’s been really nice to feel like I’m part of a team that’s really supportive of my work and all trying to get it to readers who we think would be excited about it. I think that transition has been the best part for me.
JL: The novel also deals with ideas of observation, surveillance, and perception, which makes sense in the context of a reality show. Why was this important for you to explore?
JA: This thrust of the novel was my initial entry point of interest, actually. John Berger, an art critic who is responsible for the epigraph of The One, once wrote, “One has the impression that publicity images are continually passing us, like express trains on their way to some distant terminus.” This quote seems all the more apt for our time given the constant data mining of our online habits across all our Internet usage for advertisers that exist beyond social media. I became distressed by this erosion of my privacy that seemed inevitable and massive in scale. This impulse pushed me to set the novel on a reality show, which seemed the closest I could get to an extreme version of today’s surveillance culture. I was interested in exploring the psychic damage that would be caused by the perpetual videotaping and recording in such a blatant and omnipresent manner.
Miranda, the producer, is on the other side of this camera, watching all the women with the hope of extracting valuable information. Her work in the novel plays a dual role. First, through her perspective it becomes clear how much of the media we consume, however “real” it claims to be, is staged, filtered, cropped to portray a certain message. People have known this for a long time about reality television, but the point stands in other alcoves of the Internet as well. Even efforts to be “authentic” and “genuine” are a performance. Secondly, Miranda operates as a human element to the algorithms and systems that perpetuate our cultural erosion of privacy. Throughout the course of the novel, her chapters ask what the moral implications are for those of us facilitating this culture. Does the nominal, initial consent of the subject through checking a privacy policy box or signing a contract ultimately absolve those responsible?
JL: The One investigates the differences between wanting to be desired and desire itself. What about this distinction interests you and why do you think people confuse the two?
JA: Emily is fixated on the former—seeking outside validation and attention. This is a very human impulse, and like many human impulses, can easily take over your life. It exhausts her to be so attuned to everyone around her, their hopes and wants. She has little space to exist in her own mind, and when given that space, she barely knows how to handle it. Desiring anything requires a certain level of self-knowledge. Many of our desires today are manufactured by market and societal forces, but still demand discernment: What type of person am I? What life do I aspire to live?
Emily’s initial malleability as a character allowed me to explore how our desires are shaped, and what it takes to shift from external to intrinsic motivations. It’s tricky work to find an individual taste, moral positioning to the world, and goals for the future. There’s something freeing about the idea of someone deciding for you (thinking of the famous Fleabag Season Two Confession Monologue here), but ultimately, that work is the work of life.
