This summer, as my debut novel, Night Objects, was finding its legs in the world, I watched a contestant on the TV show The Ultimatum realize, mid-episode, that she had lost control of her own narrative. Likely she'd signed up for the highly produced dating show believing that she could shape how she was perceived. Perhaps she could dress or perform her way into becoming the sweet-natured one or the astute social engineer.
I was watching as one of millions of at-home viewers, though, and the internet had already suggested how I should judge these contestants. By the time the episodes premiered on Netflix, there was a version of that woman living in the world that she did not fully author, and could not unmake. That version was volatile and needy. The internet has many words for this kind of woman. None are flattering.
These people, I thought, are so unguarded. So frail in their openness. And then I thought: Oh no.
We are all, in some sense, building golems of ourselves: figures shaped from our own clay that walk around independently, accruing their own meanings. Writers build theirs over years, in the belief that the frame of fiction offers protection. I wrote a character. I gave her a different name than mine. For a while, that distance felt real.
Night Objects is not a memoir. Its protagonist, Lenny Winter, is not me, even though she is biracial and Jewish, like me, and a student attending a school of exorbitant wealth — like I did. She's 15 when she loses her mother, whereas I was 23. After that loss, she is so numb from depression that she dissociates, watching herself move toward danger with the strange slowness of a dream. This also happened to me, but not in the same way — not exactly. I built the character of Lenny out of memory and imagination, in an attempt to metabolize surviving the violence of trying to belong somewhere that wasn't built for me.
Writers spend years with their most private material, processing, reprocessing, shaping it into a type of golem who makes her own choices, creates her own trouble. Fiction gives writers the gift of separation from their characters, or the illusion of it. For a while, I wore that illusion as a cloak of protection.
Writing begins, for me, with a flash: a fraction of a moment of emotion. You're running errands and you see a man with his head tucked between his knees, weeping. It makes you curious, this moment. You want to examine it and dissect it and put it on display. The story forms around it like a pearl — and in that story, if you're lucky, a character springs to life who can hold the feelings you were so curious about.
When I was writing Night Objects, the emotional center of the narrative was immediately apparent to me — grief, displacement, institutional corruption — and the thriller structure arrived as the engine that could take all of that to the moon. The genre gave me structure and enough momentum to generate consequences. It gave me, I thought, control. But I'd soon learn that I had none.
Reality TV and publishing have something else in common: social media has permeated both. If you’re often online, it’s difficult to encounter anything — a show, book, or person — without first absorbing the discourse around it. There are screengrabs, quotes emblazoned against headshots, excoriating takes disguised as memes, thinkpieces on Substack, microthinkpieces on Threads. The internet produces a consensus in hours. There’s always a "correct" take.
So after Night Objects was published, I dipped a toe into those tumultuous waters. Eventually, inevitably, I was up past midnight, typing my own name into a search bar and discovering that the world had already formed its opinions about my golem — and, by extension, about me. I learned that some readers found Lenny an unreliable narrator of her own story. Selfish. Self-destructive. Annoying.
I was annoying, too. I cried in a professor's office. I made bad decisions. I asked for third and fourth chances. I floated away from myself. From some vantage point above my body, I watched myself doing these things and I was ashamed. Writing Lenny allowed me to pluck that person from within, set her in front of me, and listen to her. It was a different kind of abstraction, one that gave me what reality TV doesn’t allow: the ability to hold the "edit" in my hands, and shape it into a story that made sense to me.
Except I couldn't control the readers' perception, and so I couldn’t, after all, control the outcome. To some, my careful, depressed protagonist — whom I understood better than I understood myself at her age, narrated a decade later — was simply unlikeable. She was the villain of her own edit. And yet — a reader felt something. Isn’t that the point?
Reality TV and publishing are about the same thing. Not the drama of manufactured conflict, but the ancient human need to feel things collectively. Reality TV is improv: unscripted emotion made public, shameful feelings writ large for an audience that recognizes itself in them. Grief layered atop trauma. Rage that isn’t disproportionate once you understand its source. It's terrifying to feel something that deeply when everyone around you seems fine. But we watch because we need to. We experience collective catharsis when someone else's private pain becomes briefly, blazingly public. Why shouldn't we bring people into our experience of the world — make them laugh, judge, feel anger, pity, tenderness? This is what storytelling has always been for. This is why I wrote the book.
I think about the reality TV contestant watching herself on screen, knowing there's little she can do about all of it now, recognizing and not recognizing herself. Rejecting it and seeing the truth anyway. There's something precarious and alive in the helplessness of being read at scale. So I made the choice, with full knowledge of the risk, to give my golem life anyway. To open my hands to grasp the private material — the grief, the shame, the floating above my own body — and build something that could live outside me. To choose, deliberately, to be seen.
Eli Raphael grew up in Miami, Florida, and now lives in rural Washington State. Night Objects is her first novel
Watch Katie's interview for the Katie Couric Book Club with Eli, right here!
