You may have noticed a recent trend in fan fiction-inspired stories of love affairs with pop stars. Well, one pop star. Because they all follow a similar template: boyish good looks, a career that started in their teens or via a boyband, androgynous dressing and, above all, an inconceivable amount of fame.
The most notable recent example of this is The Idea of You, the 2017 book by Robinne Lee that was turned into a major motion picture with Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine earlier this year. As much as Lee is sick of the association now, it’s well known that Galitzine’s character was modelled on pop superstar and former One Direction member Harry Styles.
Before that, there was the lesser-known After TV series, based on a series of novels of the same name, written by Anna Todd, which in turn were inspired by Harry Styles and One Direction. It all feels part of a wider trend of former fangirls, once relegated to online channels such as Wattpad and Archive of Our Own, now being old enough to become published authors (or playwrights, see: Fangirls, the new play at The Lyric Theatre where a boyband singer called Harry is kidnapped by his own fans) and acclaimed ones at that.
Now we have Gold Rush, the debut novel by Millennial Love author and Independent columnist Olivia Petter. But Gold Rush is no work of giddy fan fiction, it is a cautionary tale. Its protagonist, Rose, is introduced to her own Harry Styles-type pop due to her job in the publishing world. Rose works in the press office of magazine publishing giant Firehouse, a proxy for Condé Nast, where Petter herself once worked. Like many young adult fiction (or fan fiction) protagonists, Rose is awkward, just the right amount of snarky, but still pretty and slim enough to conform to traditional beauty standards. The publishing world’s Bella Swan, if you will.
During the book’s version of the GQ Men of the Year awards, Rose encounters Milo Jax, an impossibly famous singer with “dark curls framed by angular cheekbones” who wears white and pink three piece suits to perform at the Grammys. He got famous when he was 15 via YouTube and has a song about how a woman is most beautiful when she’s natural and uncaring. “He was not of this world,” Rose’s internal monologue tells us when she first sees him.
But when Milo and Rose’s relationship gets sexual, the template changes. What unfurls is not a whirlwind romance of private jets and avoiding paparazzi, but an I May Destroy You-esque tale of regaining lost memories and reckoning with consent. Considering the current slew of aspirational popstar relationship fan fiction, this book shouldn’t feel more current.
And yet, it’s limited by its own time period. Set in 2017, Gold Rush takes place in a world where Topshop still exists, women still wear feminist slogan tees with velvet flares and, crucially, the #Me Too movement has yet to take place. As such, the story of nonconsensual sex it tells is, as sad as it is to say, one we have heard a thousand times before. When Rose wakes up with “bright, look-at-me red” blood between her legs, it paints a scene we know all too well.
That doesn’t diminish how important it is to tell these stories, especially for certain audiences. For instance, 18-year old me, who used to reblog pictures of Julian Casablancas from The Strokes on Tumblr with the caption “step on me”, probably needed to hear this even if she didn’t want to. This is a valuable piece of literature for young fan girls, and the gossipy prose makes it equally easy to digest and interesting enough to keep someone younger interested.
Its pacing is pitch-perfect, the plot is consistent and engaging, sprinkled with subplots of troubled influencers and spoiled south west London rich girls that make it entirely bingeable. However, it is at times a little un-self aware in terms of the main character’s privilege, and there are some minor mistakes, such as when Milo Jax comes out for a guest performance at a new boy band’s “first proper London gig” with 70,000 people in attendance. For a “first proper London gig” that’s pretty impressive - it’s nearly four times the size of the O2.
Gold Rush holds a necessary core warning. But for people who have consumed a lot of media around the suffering of women (i.e most adult women living in 2024), it offers little new information about these encounters with celebrities, and it would have been more interesting to explore the post Me Too reality - i.e no meet-ups without an NDA, as Billie Eilish describes in her song of the same name, pre-vetting of potential sexual candidates, how the worst have managed to slip through the net.
It’s not a particularly challenging read in any sense, and while Petter’s real life experience in the Condé Nast press office does add a more firm “insidery” feel to the book, it can also make the author’s voice feel quite factual or on-the-nose at times. On the other hand, this does make for some flashes of very believable media-circle humour, such as prawn cocktail being described as the “kitten heel of the canapé world”, or a character wanting to cast Tara Reid in their biopic to help rehabilitate her image.
And despite its flaws, Gold Rush would be well suited for a visual retelling, much like its neighbours in the current fan fiction-inspired spate of culture. With a good enough director and a modern update to its pre-#MeToo warning, this could be a successful TV series in the making. Like the Fangirls play at The Lyric, we can expect to see a fresh spin on this slew of fan-meets-popstar romances soon enough. But they’ll have a discerning millennial and Gen Z audience to impress, so the more hyper-relevant they are, the better.
