Season 4 Episode 5: In Conversation with Sheena Patel

Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for film and TV who was born and raised in North West London. She is also part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective. In 2022 she was chosen as one of the Observer's Top 10 best debut novelists. I’m A Fan is her debut novel.

The Guardian described I’m A Fan as a “fizzing debut that’s hard to put down”, and I can’t really argue with that. In this episode, Sheena and I cover everything from complex female characters, The Sopranos, performative feminism and Instagram as a platform of oppression. She also kindly reads a passage from the novel.

Here is the blurb from publisher Rough Trade Books:

“In I'm A Fan, a single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal heteronormative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.”

Show Notes:

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Blood and Guts in High School by Cathy Acker
Catch Sheena at the Southbank Centre
Rough Trade Books