Jonathan Franzen is impersonated so often he has saved on his desktop a picture of himself holding a sign that says ‘I’m not on Twitter.’ He periodically emails this to the relevant authorities who, presumably, take prompt action. I took reassurance from the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time. Then, once fake me had established that I was probably not who I said I was, he hung up and blocked me. We were strangers in the dark, breathing on each other. I watched the blank screen and listened to the faint sound of someone exhaling. The impersonator had a view of my bathroom’s recessed downlight and swirls of condensation, could hear a toddler bashing a toy duck against the tiles. There was a long moment when neither of us said anything on account of not looking or sounding like the people we were pretending to be. Peering at the screen, I saw that he had switched off his camera. With sudsy fingers, I answered and quickly angled the phone towards the ceiling in order to hide myself. I watched the hooded figure glowing on my screen. I waited all day for a reply and then, during my son’s bathtime, my phone rang. There it was one of my author photos but here it was a spooky hooded figure sitting in front of a laptop, face obscured by a question mark, looking halfway between a hacker and the Grim Reaper. I noticed that his WhatsApp profile picture was different from his Instagram. I was nervous!’ and then ‘Shall we chat? Are you in the studio?’ (I loved the idea that I had a studio.) I got no reply. Only then did I send my impersonator a message on WhatsApp: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t text you straight away. So I ordered a new sim card – ‘my burner’, as I made a point of calling it – then bought a little black box from a man called Igor on the internet that would allow me secretly to record both sides of a phone conversation. I thought about texting but then I got worried because that would mean sharing my actual phone number. Real me and fake me seemed to have an instant sexual chemistry. Kisses and Hugs for you … Am having a studio session right now kindly text me, I will get back to you asap. Baby please don’t share my number with anyone. ‘Are you single? If yes, here is my private cell, drop me a message and I will get back to you asap. ‘You seem to be a very nice person,’ he said. ‘I live half the time in London, half the time in New York,’ I wrote, remaining vague yet glamorous. ‘I wanna use this medium to get up close and personal with a Lucky Fan. ‘Wow I really appreciate you,’ he replied. ‘I’ve read everything you’ve written, even the unpublished stuff.’ Having not heard back from Instagram, I eventually decided to set up a new account, a fake one under the name Joanna, and sent myself a private message.

This means we may be unable to review your ID or it may take a long time.’ In other words: you’re almost certainly not important enough. When I reported the problem directly to Instagram – filling in their online form, sending a photo of me holding my passport – I had to admire the brazenness of the disclaimer that came up as I clicked ‘send’: ‘We’re trying hard to prioritise reviews for the most urgent cases. The confrontational comments they left on fake me’s profile were immediately flagged as abusive and removed. Then I asked my friends to make contact on my behalf. So I joined Instagram and sent fake me a message asking him (I thought of him as a him) to stop – after which he quickly blocked me. If fake me continued at this rate then he would quickly become more popular than real me, and – since popularity is now the only true measure of legitimacy – I would, at that moment, become my own impersonator. My replicant had more than six thousand followers after only four months. Someone had taken all the underwhelming posts from my Twitter profile – about how sea cucumbers eject their internal organs when under threat, about how Gary Oldman and George Saunders share the same face – and reposted them to enormous success. But when I looked online I discovered that I did and I was really quite popular. This was surprising because I didn’t think that I had an Instagram account. The novel ends when Yakov’s friends have him sectioned, leaving his impersonator to become the real Yakov and be brilliant at it.Ī few months ago a poet contacted me to ask if my Instagram account had been hacked. When Yakov attempts to reclaim his life he can never get past the problem that people prefer the replicant to the real thing. Gradually Yakov finds that his double has stolen his friends and replaced him at work, and that he is generally doing a much better job of being Yakov than Yakov ever could. D ostoevsky ’s The Double tells the story of Yakov Golyadkin, whose life is destroyed by the arrival of someone who looks identical to him but is far more charming and likeable.

Picturesque fake fiction