photo by Sally Sum
Allie Rowbottom is the author of AESTHETICA, published November 2022 by Soho Press and named a best book of 2022 by Glamour Magazine, NPR and Vanity Fair. Allie’s first book, the critically acclaimed memoir, Jell-O Girls (Little Brown and Company) was a 2018 NYT Editor’s Choice Selection, Amazon Best Book of the Month, Indie Next Pick, and Real Simple Best Book of the year.
Allie’s essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Elle, The New York Tines , The London Times, Alta, Dazed, New York Tyrant, Forever Magazine and elsewhere. In 2024 her reported piece, "Are We All Technosexuals Now?," was the lead story for the 2024 New York Times Style Section Valentines Day feature. Her short story "He Dreams About the Bunny Ranch," published by Alta Journal, was a finalist for the 2023 National Magazine Award in fiction. She wrote the column, Beauty Mark, for Byline.
Allie holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Jon Lindsey.
Agent—Erin Harris, eharris@foliolit.com
Publicity—Johnny Nguyen, jnguyen@sohopress.com
Film & TV–Ali Lefkowitz, ali@anonymouscontent.com
P U B L I C A T I O N S
FAre We All Technosexuals Now? The New York Times, February 2024
Fashion is Selling Girlhood , Elle Magazine, January 2024
Beauty Mark: A column, Byline, 2023-onward
Roller Skates, White Claw and a Broken Wrist, The New York Times, Spring 2023
Pamela Anderson’s Just a Girl, Bustle, Spring 2023
From One Angle I am Beautiful from Another I Am Wrong, The London Times, Spring 2023
Aesthetica: A Novel, published by Soho Press, Fall 2022
Cavewoman LLC, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2022
Last of the Long Hot Days, Joyland, September 2022
He Dreams About the Bunny Ranch, Alta Journal, January 2022
Even Before Success Pussy was Number One, Forever Magazine, November 2021
Interview: Palm Springs Eternal: Allie Rowbottom Interviews Jon Lindsey, Hobart, June 2021
Roundtable: Coat Full of Pockets: A Story Collection Roundtable, The Rumpus, June 2021
For the Roses, Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond (Anthology), Harper Collins, August 2021
Three Poems, New York Tyrant, February 2021
Interview: No Conversation@DudesInTheDMs Is Making the Internet Safer for Women, Bitch Magazine, February 2021
Aura-Lift ™, Hobart, October 2020
Two Against One, Post Road, October 2020
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S E L E C T P R E S S
The Makings of a Literary It Girl, Nylon Magazine , February 2024
Aesthetica on The New York TImes Paperback Row
Would You Risk Your Life to Return to Your Former Self? New York Times Book Review, 2022
Allie Rowbottom is No Botox Moralist, New York Magazine’s The Cut 2022
Love It Here, an Exclusive Excerpt from Aesthetica, Elle Magazine
AESTHETICA is a Dazzling Destabilizing Novel that Cathartically Confronts Influencer Culture, Glamour Magazine 2022
Allie Rowbottom’s AESTHETICA is much more than an Instagram novel, Vanity Fair, 2022
Allie Rowbottom’s AESTHETICA isn’t abouot Instagram, it’s about Survival , Nylon Magazine 2022
Allie Rowbottom and Tea Hacic-Vlahovic Strip Down to Sell Books, Interview Magazine, 2022
Perfectly Imperfect Newsletter, 2022
What Sort of Woman Would I Be? Review of Aesthetica by Phillipa Snow, Astra Magazine 2022
Plastic Surgery Meets Suspense in Allie Rowbottom’s AESTHETICA, KQED 2022
The Lady Doth Post Too Much, Bomb Magazine, 2022
AESTHETICA is a Modern Tale of a Timeless Desire to be Seen, Document Journal, 2022
AESTHETICA Exposes the Ugly Side of Instagram, AnOther Mag, 2022
Allie Rowbottom on her Body Modification Novel AESTHETICA, the Observer, 2022
Starred Review oof AESTHETICA, Publisher’s Weekly 2022
The Fine Line Between Liberation and Self Destruction, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2022
It’s A Lot of Work Being a Woman on Instagram, Electric Lit 2022
When I Write I Leave my Body a Little, the Millions, 2022
Review of AESTHETICA, Kirkus Reviews, 2022
Interview in Sex Magazine, 2022
Selected Prose Podcast, 2022
Allie Rowbottom on Social Media, Plastic Surgery and Being Objectified, Polyester Zine, 2021
Currents: An Interview Series with Brian Alan Ellis, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 2021
1StoryPodcast, November 2020
The Creative Non-Fiction Podcast, The Page As a Safe Place, July 2019
In Jell-O Girls, a Dark Family History Behind a Candy Colored Dessert, The New York Times, 2018
How Patriarchy Imprinted Itself on the Family Who Created Jell-O, The New York Times Book Review, 2018
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
A B O U T
AESTHETICA
In a debut novel as radiant as it is caustic, a former influencer confronts her past—and takes inventory of the damages that underpin the surface-glamour of social media.
At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity. Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the “black and white store,” peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She too is seeking rebirth. She’s about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica™, a procedure that will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self. Provided she survives the knife.
But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of “woke” masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid.
Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of “Instagram face,” delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #MeToo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities.
“AESTHETICA is the best book about influencers I’ve ever read and the only book about the internet that doesn’t make the author sound like a thousand year old vampire.”
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“Allie's writing is a light to follow in the dark, illuminating those human realities we often wish would stay hidden, but deep down, if we're open enough, are grateful to have seen."
“In her dark, moving, fascinating, and healing first novel, Allie Rowbottom compassionately and lucidly examines one of the more painful, disturbing, stranger, and newest subcultures that our misogynist dominator society has produced.“
“A challenging, compassionate novel about the aftermath of exploitation and packaged youth . . . While structurally the novel is conventional, tracking a naïve young woman’s entrapment in a sordid world and her reawakening as an adult, Rowbottom’s specificity about one moment in internet culture and the contradictory ideologies about autonomy and desire young women must parse make it worthwhile reading.”
—Kirkus Reviews
In 1899, Orator Francis Woodward bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and generations of his family enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments.
Allie Rowbottom’s mother, Mary, niece of Jell-O matriarch Edith Woodward, grew up in the shadow of this privilege. When more than 100 years after the Jell-O deal was struck, Mary was diagnosed with cancer, the same disease that had claimed her own mother's life, she became determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse" and her looming mortality. Mary began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. JELL-O GIRLS is the liberation of that story.
An examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, JELL-O GIRLS is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love and loss. Throughout, Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
One of People Magazine's Best Books of Summer
An Amazon Best Book of the Month
An Indie Next Pick
A Real Simple Best Book of 2018
In Jell-O Girls, a Dark Family History Behind a Candy Colored Dessert, The New York Times, 2018
How Patriarchy Imprinted Itself on the Family Who Created Jell-O, The New York Times Book Review, 2018
Jell-O Girls: The Broke the Mold, The Wall Street Journal, 2018