E-Reads: The Cult of the Self
Welcome to E-Reads, where Boshemia cofounder E shares what she’s reading lately.
Lately, the books on my nightstand (and Libby app) have started to blur—not because they lack distinction, but because they all whisper the same gospel: You are brand, a performance, a private religion. According to my latest reads, the modern self is a project to be continuously curated and cultivated. I call this the cult of the self.
What follows is a little round up of what I’ve been reading these days: a blend of razor-sharp nonfiction and slow-simmering novels, all by women.
Language is Power
In Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, Amanda Montell dissects the linguistic tools shared by cult leaders, fitness influencers, and MLM coaches alike. Whether it’s a SoulCycle instructor, a Silicon Valley thought-leader, or a woman whispering affirmations into her ring light, Montell finds they are all reading from the same gospel, and the sermon is subtle: change your language, change your reality. Say manifest, not hope. Say align, not decide. Power hides in plain sight—disguised as community, personal growth, even therapy-speak.
Words like boundary, toxic, and energy slide easily into our mouths, sleek and slippery. They've been severed from their root systems, unmoored from their clinical or spiritual origins, and polished until they gleam with self-righteous clarity. We use them to draw lines around ourselves, to build gentle little fences: “I’m protecting my peace” becomes not just a balm, but a boundary-stone—sometimes a weapon.
Montell isn’t condemning these words so much as warning us to notice when language, once meant to heal or connect, calcifies into dogma. When empowerment becomes isolation. When self-work becomes self-worship. The liturgy of the modern self is fluent in branding, and fluent in retreat. It’s a private religion, stitched together from borrowed phrases and aspirational hashtags. In Montell’s telling, our speech reveals not just our beliefs, but the systems of belief we’ve subscribed to—sometimes without realizing we joined a church.
Influencer or Oracle?
If nonfiction names the cultural phenomenon, recent novels stage it: flesh it out, give it a face, a wardrobe, a monologue. They build the altar and then ask us to kneel beside their protagonists, watching them sacrifice themselves to the cult of the self.
In Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, the protagonist—an exhausted, sharp-eyed tech worker in San Francisco—lives under the shadow of a literal black hole. It hangs above her like a private omen, a cosmological metaphor for the spiritual vacuum of her curated life. She eats the right snacks, sends the right Slack messages, sleeps with the wrong men, all while maintaining the appearance of thriving. She’s fluent in the rituals of high-performance femininity, from oat milk lattes to LinkedIn hustle-speak, but underneath it all she is starving. The black hole isn’t just depression—it’s the gravity of a life defined by metrics, optics, and vibes.
In Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, the heroine is less a woman than a reflection. She performs femininity like she’s read the instruction manual cover to cover and taken notes in the margins. Her body is an object in space, her mind a stage set. A gothic cousin of Patrick Bateman, she floats through her days like a doll haunted by awareness, her internal life bled dry by the need to appear acceptable, desirable, docile. In this world, surface isn’t just everything—it’s the only thing.
Both women are ghosted by the same specter: the Ideal Self. The one that lives in moodboards and Instagram captions. They are haunted not by demons, but by expectations so deeply internalized they might as well be sacred texts. Their unraveling isn’t chaotic, but artful. Stylized. Even enviable. Their breakdowns glint with aesthetic beauty, as if collapse is the only remaining rebellion. The only way out of the algorithm is to burn it down from the inside.
These novels don’t mock the performance of identity, but rather they render it with tragic empathy. They understand the impossible strain of becoming a brand. And they ask: when every woman is both preacher and product, what does salvation even look like?
The Language of Collapse
“Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.” —Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe
That split—the ache of doubling—haunts every book in this stack. It’s not just a thematic through-line; it’s a spiritual condition of contemporary life. Who are we, beneath the self we brand, present, caption, and optimize? Do we even remember?
In Cultish, Amanda Montell shows us how language becomes a scaffolding for belief, not just in institutions, but in ourselves. We don’t just use language; we’re shaped by it. The words we choose (or are given) define our inner narratives. Vocabulary becomes identity.
In Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener strips away the luster of Silicon Valley’s promise. Her memoir is full of shimmering surfaces, pomegranates, kombucha, and venture capital, but beneath it all is a workforce being linguistically reprogrammed. The jargon is dense, absurd, strangely devotional. A “culture” that claims to be disruptive reveals itself as eerily conformist, all while its participants slowly lose the thread of who they were before they said yes to the job, the NDA, the $80,000 signing bonus. What disappears beneath a “seamless user experience” is the soul.
In Ripe, the black hole devouring the protagonist is both literal and existential. She is not unaware of her performance—on the contrary, she sees herself clearly, almost too clearly. Her undoing is not a surprise. It is inevitable. The system tells her she is free to choose, even as it hands her a script and a ring light. Her identity is consumed in the churn of productivity, depression aestheticized into content.
And in Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (by far the best novel I have read in a good long while), we find the quietest form of rupture. Here, selfhood splinters not under capitalism or cultish language, but in the fragile choreography of intimacy. Grief strips the brothers bare, but instead of clarity, they find confusion. They are trying to love, to be known, but even in the most private of relationships, we perform. We curate ourselves for those we long to be close to. We build mirrors and hope they’ll show us something true.
Across each of these works, identity is not a stable possession. It is porous, iterative. We are written and rewritten by the systems we inhabit: capitalism, language, grief, love. If there are two of us—one real and one performative—maybe neither is wholly true. Maybe the self is not a fixed point, but a verb. Something we keep trying to name before it slips away again.
Devotion Looks Like Self-Care
Sometimes I wonder what we did before we turned ourselves into content. Before our goals were metrics. Before self-discovery became synonymous with self-promotion. Before I worshipped at the cult of self.
And then I gather myself. I sit on my porch with my dog and I read. Maybe no good book offers answers to our soul-searching, our attempts at understanding who we are. But they can name the feeling: the slippery cult of the self, where devotion looks like self-care and isolation feels like empowerment.
Reading—that slow, quiet, unoptimized act—is perhaps the last of our rituals that doesn’t demand an audience.
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
“Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.”
The millennial burnout novel reimagined as something grotesque and glittering. A surreal, pitch-black novel about a depressed tech worker navigating capitalism, girlboss culture, and existential dread. The presence of a literal black hole over her head makes the metaphor heartbreakingly clear: collapse is inevitable, and maybe even necessary.
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley is a slow-burning horror story disguised as a memoir. A literary outsider turned tech insider, Wiener enters the cult of Silicon Valley, watching its gods, its absurdities, its moral vacuums from the inside. Her prose is cool, distant, and devastating, a millennial Joan Didion observing the bizarre rituals of the internet age. A devastating memoir of a literary outsider turned tech insider. Set against the backdrop of Silicon Valley’s sleek absurdities, Wiener maps how jargon replaces morality—and how identity dissolves into productivity.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
A quiet, elegiac novel about two brothers drifting through grief after the death of their father. Intermezzo captures Rooney’s signature style—emotional restraint, elliptical conversations, and aching silences—but this time in a darker register. It’s about men who don’t know how to talk about pain, and the rituals (boxing, gambling, sex, silence) they use instead. Identity here is not declared—it’s submerged, flickering between performances of strength and private unraveling. Rooney renders the ineffable in low light, letting absence speak louder than resolution.
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
“A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.” Amanda Montell takes the world of cults and cracks it open—not with conspiracy, but with linguistics. In Cultish, she unpacks how language hypnotizes, converts, and controls, from Heaven’s Gate to SoulCycle. This is my favorite read of 2025 (so far).
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
A gothic, psychological descent into curated femininity. Think American Psycho meets Bridgerton in a haunted house. The narrator is so devoted to performance, she forgets she ever had a self beneath it.