Obsession has consequencesâŚ
Itâs been twenty-five years since Babs and her sister, Margot, met teen heartthrob Austin Lewis while visiting family in L.A., and the last three of those years have been brutal. In the aftermath of the tragic death of her husband, Babs has become paralyzed by grief, isolated from friends, and is fired from the Chicago law firm where she worked for nearly twenty years. It is at this point that she runs into Austin again.
Things are different now, though; the years have not been kind to Austin, either. In Chicago to manage his motherâs estate following her death, Austin has long-since been relegated to D-list status. Only Gen-X nostalgia and his good eye as a producer keep him connected to the business that once made him a star. Bonding through their respective griefs, Austin and Babs quickly fall for each other. However, as their relationship intensifies, Babs becomes the target of aggressive cyberbullying, which Austin suspects originates with a small, toxic subset of his fandom who call themselves the âLewnatics.â
When it is revealed that Margot is a Lewnatic, Babs must decide who to trust as she forges a new life with Austin at her side.
Obsession has consequencesâŚ
Itâs been twenty-five years since Babs and her sister, Margot, met teen heartthrob Austin Lewis while visiting family in L.A., and the last three of those years have been brutal. In the aftermath of the tragic death of her husband, Babs has become paralyzed by grief, isolated from friends, and is fired from the Chicago law firm where she worked for nearly twenty years. It is at this point that she runs into Austin again.
Things are different now, though; the years have not been kind to Austin, either. In Chicago to manage his motherâs estate following her death, Austin has long-since been relegated to D-list status. Only Gen-X nostalgia and his good eye as a producer keep him connected to the business that once made him a star. Bonding through their respective griefs, Austin and Babs quickly fall for each other. However, as their relationship intensifies, Babs becomes the target of aggressive cyberbullying, which Austin suspects originates with a small, toxic subset of his fandom who call themselves the âLewnatics.â
When it is revealed that Margot is a Lewnatic, Babs must decide who to trust as she forges a new life with Austin at her side.
For a while, it was one of the truths in my two truths and a lie: I fucked Austin Lewis. I canât remember the other truthâthere arenât a lot of things about me that are beyond belief. I amâwith the exception of the Austin Lewis encounterâspectacularly ordinary.
My lie was that I could roller skate backwards. I grew up in the 1980s when roller skating parties were all the rage, and I was pretty competent at the forward skating stuff. But I never could get the backwards skating. The kind where one leg glides in front of the other like some kind of otherworldly ballerina on wheels, and it looks like that should absolutely not move a person backwards, but it does. I could never do that. I never got past the figure-eight thing, which is nowhere near as cool, and you canât get any speed with it. I guess none of itâs cool anymore. Austin Lewis sure as hell isnât cool anymore.
He's on social media, though. Instagram. I follow him, which, in light of our encounter, I admit is a little weird. We fucked back in 1997, so it was quite a few years later that I âfollowedâ him. I hadnât forgotten about him; there just wasnât really any way back then to keep in touch, so to speak. But when social media arrived on the scene, I jumped on that, and after following the eight people in my family, and a few of the people I graduated high school with, and then a few randoms, I started in on the celebritiesâcurrent and past. He never followed me back.
Austinâs star has long since faded, anyway. A nebula or something. I was pre-law in undergrad, so I donât really know the phases of a star. What I do know is that in 1997, when he asked me if I wanted a photograph, too, his star was burning bright, and the correct answer to that question was unequivocally yes.
Because I am unrelentingly socially awkward, I naturally responded, âThatâs okay. Iâm fine.â
I remember he looked at me thenâhe had these eyes. Theyâre probably what made him a star (and then a nebula), but they were so incredibly clear and blue. They looked like theyâd been special ordered from some child star parts catalog. Iâm assuming the catalog also sold that haircut that parted down the middle and was long on the sides. He didnât have that haircut. His hair was too thick for that, and he opted for a southern California, short and spiky, fresh-from-the-surf thing. It was a good decision. He probably didnât make it himself.
He also was no longer a child star in the summer of 1997. He was, what, I guess twenty-five or so then. I was almost twenty, a rising junior in college. I was already dating Ryan, but not for very long, and the expectations were different then. You could be dating someone and be serious about them and not speak to them for a week because youâd run out of minutes on your cell phone (if you had one, which neither Ryan nor I did), or couldnât get a long-distance card. I remember that summer writing Ryan real letters. On paper.
Ryanâs mother was, letâs say, âoverprotective,â and Ryan wasnât allowed to call me from the phone in their apartment, so, he would go to the apartment complex clubhouse and call me from the pay phone there. That phone required thirty-five cents to make a call, but it was so old, it couldnât tell the difference between coins. Ryan would feed the metal slot two pennies, which it happily accepted in exchange for a thirty-minute phone call with me. Now that I think about it, that could have been my second truthâthe pennies in a payphone. It sounds like a title for a book, Nicholas Sparks maybe, but that was actually how he called me. Each summer he was home. Maybe heâd call when he said he would, and maybe he wouldnât. Heâd leave a message with a time heâd call back. Sometimes I was home. Sometimes I wasnât. Thatâs just how it was.
The summer of 1997, though, my aunt and uncle invited my sister Margot and me out to California to visit. They were my dadâs brother and his wife, and my dad left when I was ten and Margot was five. So, we didnât really know them. I think thatâs one of the reasons they invited us. They didnât have children and wanted to be the involved aunt and uncle, or to save us from the desolation of our unsupervised, single-parent household, or maybe they just felt like we were family, and they should know us.
I think, like a lot of older couples who never had children, they thought of nineteen and fourteen as somehow younger. They had it in their minds that Margot and I still occupied that little girl phase, and they could take us to the zoo, buy us stuffed animals (truly, each of our beds had a brand-new stuffed animal on the pillow), drown us in the pink cotton candy of gender-conformity, and have a little taste of parenthood. They hadnât counted on us being adults inchoate, with Sony Discmans, boyfriends, likes and dislikes. The allure of going to California was, well, not alluring. The phase of thinking the mere fact of being in Los Angeles was somehow, itself, cool had gone the way of roller skating (forward or backwards).
Their house was hugeâthe sort of house people with a ton of money and no kids have. Big empty bedrooms and acres of plush white carpet that had never had even a single drop of grape Faygo spilled on it. The dishwasher was always empty because they never cooked and never ate at home. We each had our own bedroom, and each bedroom had its own attached bathroomâluxurious by any measure, but particularly so for a couple of kids who grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath walkup in Chicago.
The whole thing with Austin started with a simple enough question.
âWell, what do you want to do this afternoon, Barbara?â my Aunt Iris asked. She must have picked up on our general boredom and our accompanying resentment at having that boredom inflicted upon us.
Ignoring that sheâd called me by my full name, which I detested, I suggested, âThe beach?â thinking thatâs what people did in Los Angeles in the summer. Itâs what people did in Chicago.
Aunt Iris wrinkled her nose. âHot,â she said as if commenting on an odor rather than the weather.
âWe could go see a taping,â my uncle Leo volunteered.
To this day, I still donât know what he did for a living, what allowed them to have this huge house in whatever Los Angeles suburb, and what connected my uncle to The Maple Street Martins, but that show and Austin Lewis were, unbeknownst to Uncle Leo or Aunt Iris, Margotâs favorite things in the entire world.
Iâd seen it a couple times; it was good. Some primetime drama that targeted multiple age demographics at once. The Martins of Maple Street (as luck would have it) had four kids: one in grade school, one in middle school, one in high school, and one in college. Later, the parents had a baby when the plots grew stale and the viewership declined. Then the show was canceled. That poor baby never even learned to walk. But this was my sisterâs favorite show, and Austin Lewis, who at age twenty-five played Bobby Martin, the high schooler in the family, was the love of Margotâs life.
For me, thoughâin the days before streamingâa television show that aired at ten on a Thursday night was easy to sacrifice to frat parties, fake-ID-entry to Connerâs Irish Pub, and making up for all those missed phone calls with Ryan. If thereâd been anything else to do at allâincluding if Aunt Iris had agreed to drop me off at the beachâI would have declined the offer to go with Uncle Leo and Margot to see the show being filmed.
Seeing a set up close like that takes a good deal of the magic out of watching the show. Or it would have if Iâd made a regular habit of watching. The house the Martins lived in was deconstructed to simply a sequence of boxes. Some of the boxes had to be next to each other because the rooms flowed one into the other. But the bedrooms were all life-size dioramas, self-contained closed ecosystems, not part of a house.
They were filming a scene in the kitchen that day, so the rest of the studio was dark, and the actors who werenât in that scene milled around, eating peanut M&Ms and making small talk that didnât make any sense to me. Austin wasnât eating peanut M&Ms and making small talk. He was sitting in a chair with (hand to God) his name on the back, reading his script. My sister spotted him and dragged us over.
The guide walking us around made the introductions. âThis is Barbara and Margot Stewart. Theyâre Leo Stewartâs nieces.â
âBabs,â I said.
âWhat?â Austin put his script down.
âMy name is Babs,â I repeated. The guide didnât acknowledge the clarification.
âCan we get a couple of photos? Theyâre here from Chicago,â she continued.
âSure,â he said.
I remember thinking, He seems like a nice guy. He had an unassuming way about him. And I could see why Margot was so head over heels. Great teeth, great hair, those eyes.
âWhat part of Chicago are you from?â he asked.
âLincoln Square,â I said. My answer irritated Margot, who wanted to be the one to have the conversation with him.
âOh. So, in the city,â he said.
This was important to me because it meant he knew something about Chicago and about the way people would say they were âfrom Chicago,â and you would ask them where in Chicago, and they would say âAuroraâ or âDeKalb.â He knew the neighborhoods.
âYeah. You know the city?â I asked. I could feel Margot heating up next to me.
âHeâs from Chicago. His mom still lives there,â Margot said.
Austin smiled a little self-consciously.
âWhere in Chicago?â I asked.
Austin looked briefly at Margot. Maybe he thought sheâd supply the street address. When she didnât, he said, âEvanston,â which is not a neighborhood in Chicago; itâs a suburb of Chicago, but the âLâ runs up there, so close enough. Itâs not Aurora.
âYou want a photograph?â he asked, turning to Margot, who beamed openly. âDid you bring a camera?â
Margot took a black Kodak disposable out of her purse, and Austin stood from his chair. He looked taller than he did in the posters on Margotâs side of our bedroom, and it seemed to me he really was too old to play a high schooler. If Iâd cared to search AltaVista, Iâd have found that the actor cast as his college-aged older brother was in his thirties.
Austin played the good sport and put his arm around my sister for the picture, smiling like he was happy to be there, and maybe he was. Some celebrities like being celebrities. The guide took the picture, and Margot, who could hardly breathe for having been physically touched by Austin Lewis, offered a barely audible âThank youâ before reaching to take the camera back from the guide.
This was when Austin asked if I wanted a photograph, too, and I offered the aforementioned âIâm fineâ when I should have just said âYesâ like a normal person.
âOh. Okay, then. Well, nice to meet you, Babs.â He stuttered a little bit, which made me giggle, which made me feel stupid.
âNice to meet you, too, Austin Lewis.â I said both of his names. âSorry. I donât know why I said that. I donât know any other Austins.â
He chuffed and returned to his seat, reaching for his script. I could feel Margotâs eyes searing into me as we headed back to the car, and I stopped talking. The meet-and-greet was over anyway.
In the car, Margot let loose. âYou are so embarrassing. I swear to God, Babs.â
I couldnât argue with her; it was true.
When the Stewart sisters met teen idol Austin Lewis in 1997, fourteen-year-old Margot was fangirling hard, and nineteen-year-old Babs (never Barbara, thank you!) was unimpressed. How unfair is it, then, that the actor immediately took an interest in Babs, but not Margot, to the point of wanting (and getting) some alone time with her?
Twenty-five years later, the encounter is barely more than a fun anecdote to tell at parties for Babs, and even Margot has put the TV show and its leading man she obsessed over behind her. Even most of the entertainment world has moved on from Austin Lewis - apart from a small but dedicated fan base that calls themselves the Lewnatics.
Life goes on, but life has been brutally hard for Babs in the past years after the sudden loss of her husband Ryan. Now that she has to take care of their two children alone while managing earth-shattering grief, her job performance suffers until the other partners in her Chicago law firm have no other choice but to ask her to leave. As luck would have it, on that same day, she runs into none other than Austin Lewis, in town from L.A. to attend his mother's funeral and settle her affairs. The chemistry between them is still there, but things are just as complicated now as they were in 1997, even if for different reasons. Austin is still famous (to an extent) and lives over 3000km away, and Babs worries about her children, now aged 12 and 15, who want their mom to be happy but also lost their dad three years ago. And there's also Margot and reopening old wounds that might simply be too painful to talk about.
As Babs and Austin continue to get to know each other, they find unexpected tenderness and comfort in each other's company. Far from an aloof celebrity, Austin shows up for her in ways that bring her the kind of hope, safety and normalcy that she thought she would never experience again after Ryan's passing. She, in turn, opens up and surprises herself with her ability to find love again.
As their relationship deepens, it becomes apparent just how complicated things can get. Not only does Margot's reaction seem weirder than Babs hoped for, but somebody starts stalking and bullying Babs online. The mean comments can be brushed off at first, but as the attacks become more personal and sinister, Babs has to figure out what kind of fan would go to these lengths, as well as whom in her personal life she can trust.
Told linearly from Babs' point of view in the first person, the story is immediately gripping, especially because of how strong Babs' voice is. She is witty and observant, and the first third of the book reads like quality women's fiction until the thriller elements kick in and the clever twists and turns start. With the year provided for each of the flashback chapters that are written in the past tense, they are clearly distinguishable from the chapters where the main narrative progresses in the present tense. The positioning of the flashback chapters is very smart too, providing a contrast between the present-day and past-day encounters with Austin, and offering background information on key dynamics between the characters just as we need them to contextualize present-day events. There is some suspense too, such as wanting to see how the initial encounter with Austin impacted the dynamic between the sisters, what Babs' marriage with Ryan was like, what happened between Babs and her mother.
Getting to know the other characters through Babs' eyes feels deeply personal and allows us to truly know them despite her subjectivity. The way the descriptions of Babs' family are gently colored by her love of them is quite moving. As a narrator, she is funny, reliable and eagle-eyed, and her thoughts and emotions are vivid, easy to follow and identify with. The other characters are well-written too, and the sisterhood between Babs and Margot feels just as important as the romantic relationships described.
With a truly masterful blend of romance and thrills, Fan Base is a deep and subversive exploration of obsession, female rivalry, and ultimately identity and autonomy as well, especially in the context of romantic relationships.