sSince early 2020, content creator Drew Afualo has made a name for herself online by expertly taking down misogynists through cutting roasts. Take, for example, your recent response to a right-wing commentary YouTuber Pearl Davis (aka JustPearlyThings), who released fatphobic and racist comments against Afualo and her boyfriend, which proved that her baked goods are rated E for everyone, not just men.
Afualo, 28, doesn’t give the words of bigots and misogynists the power to hurt her feelings because she has built her own self-confidence. Her perfect mix of mean, funny, and insightful comments taking down people who act horrible online has brought her over eight million followers on TikTok and one million on Instagram. Her self-confidence shines through in the few videos she posts on TikTok every week.
In your new book High: Don’t settle for anything less than the life you deserve, Afualo reflects on her life and relationships, tracing the experiences that made her so confident. “All the things that make me confident, that make me love, that make me think of the baddest bitch in the world, have nothing to do with how I look,” she tells TIME. Billed as “part manual, part manifesto, and part memoir,” High also presents tools to help anyone who is “not a horrible man” decenter the patriarchy.
“Patriarchy influences so many different levels of intolerance and sits alongside different levels of intolerance,” says Afualo. “It influences everything we think we love, like the way you talk, put on makeup, do your hair, the music you listen to, the movies you watch, and the media you consume. All of this can be influenced by men who think it’s amazing.”
Afuualo is speaking from his home office, located an hour outside of Los Angeles, as he prepares to put High out there in the world. On the same day of publication, she will embark on a nationwide tour to celebrate the release with her sister Deison, with whom she co-hosts the podcast. Two stupid girls. “I’m tired but excited,” she says. “I’m a Virgo, so I thrive when I work.”
Son of the internet, Afualo knows books written by influencers. He was a growing trend in early 2010 when content creators were stepping outside the confines of the internet and becoming popular. YouTubers like Tyler Oakley, Zoe Sugg (Zoella), Tanya Burr and Alfie Deyes have written books – some are non-fiction, while others have dabbled in fiction. This trend declined over the years as popular creators who achieved mainstream success wrote books that were considered inauthentic.
At first, Afualo rejected the idea of writing a book. “I’m just an online jester, and it felt like an influencer book or a memoir, and I didn’t think my words were important enough to warrant publication.” But she liked the idea after speaking to several publishers in late 2021. They told her that a book was an opportunity for her to expand on beliefs and ideologies that she can’t always capture in short clips on the internet. (Though these days she uses TikTok’s 10-minute video feature, which she says gives her “plenty of room to chatter.”)
Eventually, she accepted a publishing deal with Questlove’s Auwa Books imprint, under Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “I don’t think she’s new,” says Questlove, who found Afualo’s content during the pandemic. “I told her that she has a voice and that I think when you capture that lightning in a bottle through writing, it’s a way to preserve it forever.” Writing and revising what became High It was an entirely different creative process for Afualo, as she discovered exactly what she wanted to say — all while continuing her presence on TikTok and podcasts, which involved long conversations every week. “It was nothing but me barking and writing,” she says.
Throughout the book, Afualo delves into different parts of her life that shaped her. From a young age, she learned to rely on her Samoan family for support, while experiencing the discomfort of growing up as a person of color who does not fit into Eurocentric beauty standards. She credits her mother for shaping her beliefs and self-confidence, piecing together who she is today. In one part of the book, Afualo writes about comparing herself to one of her white friends who is much smaller than her. But her mother stopped this insecurity from growing, telling her: “You will never look like her. But that’s not a bad thing and it doesn’t make it uglier.”
Some chapters took longer than others to write, she says, because they required her to face more challenging and difficult times in her life, like her admittedly not-so-great reaction when her sister came out to her. “In the early stages of writing about these things, I wasn’t as vulnerable as I could be because I get nervous about it,” she says. Her editor would gently nudge her and ask her to enjoy the experience more, which Afualo says she was grateful for because otherwise she knew she was being superficial. “I feel like when you want to have vulnerable conversations, but you’re not willing to be vulnerable, you look like an idiot.”
The hardest chapter to write, she says, was about the pregnancy scare in 2020. She says in the book that she talked to her boyfriend, Pili, and that he knew she didn’t want to have children. After a test indicated she was pregnant, they traveled together in silence to the abortion clinic, she writes. Before the procedure, she took another test and it turned out that the initial result had been a false positive. “I realized that I didn’t want to become a motherbut my mom,” She writes.
Afualo says, “I remember when I wrote that sentence and I started crying,” she says. “I was unpacking as I was writing.” She recently told her mother and sister about this part of the book, and they all started crying together. Recording the audiobook was no easier. During the recording session, she often took breaks to compose herself while reading the chapter. “I know I’m a mean bitch online, but I’m a Cancer moon, so I’m a big softie in a lot of ways,” she says.
Afualo has always been a fan of self-help books and wanted to write something along those lines, although he notes that he is not an expert in psychology. “The only thing I’m an expert on is my lived experience in specifically unpacking a lot of my own internalized biases, my own internalized prejudice,” she says, “And how that’s led me to a place in my life where I can completely decenter men and walk with a confidence that is based solely on how I see myself and not how men perceive me.”
It’s this astute view of herself that makes Afualo, as Questlove says, “the voice of millions of women around the world who are tired of the shit.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
