Interview of Clare Stephens by Freya Bennett
The internet has made it easier than ever to connect — and to pile on. Clare Stephens’ debut novel, The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, explores what happens when one misstep turns into a public shaming, and the personal fallout that follows.
Ruby Williams thinks she can handle the outrage, but the tsunami of strangers baying for her blood soon exposes a deeper, long-buried trauma. Drawing on her decade in digital media, Stephens holds a mirror to online personas versus real lives, showing how easily empathy is lost in the noise.
I spoke with Clare about online shaming, flawed feminism, and whether forgiveness is even possible in the digital age.
Hi Clare, firstly, huge congratulations on the release of your debut novel! How’re you feeling now it’s out in the world?
Thank you! It’s strange – when you’re writing, I think you have to convince yourself, to some extent, that no one will ever read it. Obviously you’re editing yourself and writing for a reader, but if you contemplated all the possibilities of how the story would land for every single person who might read it, you’d never allow yourself to finish. That means I sort of detached from the idea of the book ever being out in the world. I didn’t anticipate how special it would feel for readers to share which parts resonated with them, and how much it would mean to me for them to ‘get’ it. So I’m feeling… grateful? Fulfilled? Satisfied? I’m not sure there’s quite the right word in the English language… but something along those lines!
Your novel explores online public shaming and digital outrage. Can you share a real-world moment or trend that sparked the idea behind Ruby Williams’ story?
Having worked in digital media for over a decade, there are many! Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, had me thinking about how we treat people as ideologies, and erase their humanity in order to prosecute them as a symbol. In the ten years since his book was published, I think the culture has become even more vicious. The scale of these pile-ons has grown because mainstream media learnt that reporting on them drives traffic, and we now exist on multiple social media platforms, all of which thrive on outrage. I remember being in my mid 20s and seeing the way Lena Dunham was treated with utter contempt from the right and the left, and wondering how a person deals with those kinds of threats to their reputation. What do you do when the pile-on has become so all-encompassing that it’s impossible to defend yourself? It reached the point where she re-homed a dog and was called an animal abuser. And I’m sure bloggers and content creators knew that tearing apart Lena Dunham in the most outlandish, brutal way was a surefire way to capture attention. That’s what got me thinking about the ‘liveability’ of being a woman in the public eye – especially one who’s young and imperfect and learning.
Ruby’s past is unlocked by a haunting scream. How did you decide to centre the book around this moment of trauma, and how did you approach revealing its meaning throughout the narrative?
Without giving anything away, my aim was to humanise the person at the centre of an online pile-on. Ruby has become synonymous with a certain brand of ‘flawed feminism’, and she’s defending herself in a way that’s making everything worse. From the outside, it’s funny to call her names, to come up with creative insults, to blame her for a broad range of social ills. She’s annoying! She’s embarrassing! She’s representative of everything we hate! But on the inside, of course, she’s a really complex person. She has her own past that informs the choices she’s made, and she’s a mass of vulnerabilities. I wanted to remind the reader of those universal human experiences that bind us all together: shame, regret, grief. I also wanted to unravel her backstory alongside the growing intensity of the pile-on, so we were seeing her humanity emerge at the same time she’s being dehumanised online. It makes sense why certain accusations affect her so deeply, because they touch this raw part of her that’s never truly healed.
As someone who previously helmed Mamamia, you understand online dynamics firsthand. How did your professional experience influence your portrayal of “the tsunami of strangers baying for her blood”?
I feel like the language of comment sections and call-out videos came very easily because I had been marinating in them for so long! I hope there’s a realism to the book, where the arguments and insults and personalities feel familiar because they are. I know them very, very well. I’ve been on the receiving end of online criticism, and I’ve also, I’m sure, jumped on a pile-on. When you’re writing and creating content day in and day out, you’re bound to get swept up in whichever Internet hysteria is dominating the zeitgeist, without necessarily stopping to consider all the nuances. So I can genuinely see both sides of pile-on culture, and empathise with the people on either side.
Reviews praise your “skillful empathy.” How do you navigate writing characters who are both sympathetic and culpable in the context of cancel culture?
The thing I love most about reading is that there are rarely clear-cut heroes and villains. You simply have characters with strong values that happen to be in conflict. The people who are driving social media pile-ons are not evil, and their aims are often admirable. They care about social justice. They want to draw people’s attention to issues that matter. They have an idealism that the world needs. The evil entity, if there is one, is the system itself – the social media platforms that have evolved to commodify our attention, and whose algorithms have discovered that the best way to do that is to prey on our instinct to be outraged.
The people who use the wrong language online, or who publish a bad take, or who make a mistake, aren’t evil either. And when they’re at the bottom of a pile-on, they’re looking at the idealists and begging for pragmatism and mercy. They’re thinking, ‘I’m not the real enemy here! How is this helpful?’ But it’s really hard to have any sense of perspective when you’re being attacked. You’re not able to acknowledge what might be valid criticism because for you, it’s wrapped up in all the name-calling and abuse and contempt.
I thought it was important to play with that complexity, and have every character be both sympathetic and culpable.
Your Substack, NQR, describes the novel as dealing with “the complexity of feminism” and “whether we have any blueprint for forgiveness on the internet.” What does forgiveness look like in a digital age, and can it ever be just, or is that part of the problem you want readers to wrestle with?
I’m not sure we have a blueprint for forgiveness online, especially for women. Bizarrely, there are men with criminal pasts where the narrative is ‘they’ve done their time! Move on!’. Yet a woman who worked with a problematic director or said something tone deaf or was difficult on-set is tarred with that brush forever. The best you can hope for is distraction – that there’s so much going on or you’re prolific enough that the public forgets what they hated you for in the first place. One of the ideas I wanted to explore in the book is that we don’t forgive strangers online for things we constantly forgive people for in real life. We all have friends or family members who have different views to our own. We like and love people who have said insensitive things, or voted differently to us. The beautiful thing about relationships is that we watch people change, and we see them for more than a fleeting opinion. I wish we could have that same empathy for people we engage with online, although the architecture of the internet makes that almost impossible.
Can you walk us through how you structured the story to create that tension between immediacy and depth?
I am very aware of our eroding attention spans, so I knew I needed to get people into the story immediately. I tried to ensure the reader always had an unanswered question in their heads that would keep them reading, and that would give me some breathing room to explore a character or a backstory in more depth. I also think the book is a bit of a Trojan Horse. It gets you in with what seems like a juicy, behind-the-scenes account of a ‘cancellation’, but then goes in a very different direction!
You’ve had a varied career, as editor-in-chief at Mamamia, podcaster, screenwriter, and content creator, and now a novelist. What inspired you to leap into fiction, and how have your previous roles shaped your debut novel?
I’m a fiction reader and always have been. For me, fiction has the power to change minds in a particularly powerful way. When you have empathy for a character you didn’t expect to, when you walk around in their shoes and see things from their perspective, it’s transformative.
With this book, I wanted to elicit the darkness of being at the bottom of an online pile-on, and how suffocating and scary and existential it feels. I knew I couldn’t do that via non-fiction, because people project their own politics and opinions onto real stories involving real people. Here, I could tailor the story to do exactly what I needed it to.
In terms of how my previous roles shaped the novel – when you write online, you learn very quickly what captures people’s attention, what makes people click, what they turn away from. I tried to use that knowledge to write something engaging and pacey. But I think being ‘inside’ media allowed me to shed light on a perspective not many people see, and humanise the imperfect people who write and commission and edit the articles you see online. They’re not monsters, and they’re not part of some big conspiracy. But they are trapped in an evolving media landscape that’s pushing us further to the extremes.
Do you have any goals to write more novels? (I hope so!)
I would love to! I’m not currently working on another novel, but I’ve got a few ideas percolating. I’d love to write something a bit lighter than The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, and focus on humour. But this was always going to be my first book – it’s the one I knew I needed to write for a very long time.
