The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley

Publisher: Penguin Books

First Publication: 2020

Book Review: The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley

Honesty time – how many of us are truly authentic these days? I’m talking about stripping away the filters, the curated online profiles, and just being buck-naked real with ourselves and others? If the very idea makes you want to crawl under a rock and hide, then Clare Pooley’s novel The Authenticity Project is going to be a refreshing wake-up call for you.

This heartwarming yet refreshingly unsentimental story kicks off when an eccentric old artist named Julian Jessop gets fed up with the dishonest world and starts a social experiment of radical transparency. After an incident involving a bougie Monica from accounting, our man Julian goes full David Foster Wallace and begins pouring out his unvarnished life story into a green notebook, culminating in a blunt to-do list on the final page commanding the book’s future readers to share their own authentic truths.

From there, the novel morphs into a kaleidoscopic character study as Julian’s cathartic notebook passes through an unforgettable cast of strangers, each adding more raw confessions to the growing manuscript. Whether it’s Alice, a new mum projecting a perfect social media facade masking her vulnerabilities, the addict Hazard who can’t seem to do anything right no matter how hard he tries, or Riley the free-spirited Aussie gardener, Pooley renders her characters with humor and remarkable empathy. Even the minor yet formidable presence of Mrs. Wu, who packs an outsize impact, demonstrates Pooley’s gift for crafting a richly populated world.

But do not judge these people on first impressions, as is often the case, there is more to them than meets the eye. What elevated this from feel-good pap for me was how unafraid Pooley is to let these “authenticity project” participants be selfish, flawed, and at times frustratingly blind to their own shortcomings. There’s a refreshing honesty to these depictions that kept me hooked, despite the episodic nature of following the green notebook from person to person.

For example, there’s one chapter following a young social media influencer that absolutely skewered modern Internet culture in brilliant ways. You can’t help but cringe as this young woman obsesses over Instagram likes and perception while lamenting that “#grateful #abundancemindset” are just empty filters obscuring her profound loneliness and anxiety over fading into irrelevancy. Talk about uncomfortably on point!

Pooley has a wicked gift for these sorts of insights – like depicting the subtle self-deception of a husband caught in a decades-long rut, or how trauma can lodge itself in our souls and fester for years until the right catalyst sparks brutally overdue confrontation. Time and again, I found myself audibly reacting as Pooley pierced through the polite veneers we all put on and exposed those difficult truths about ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong, The Authenticity Project isn’t some bleak slog through human misery. There’s ample heart-warming moments of connection and hope sprinkled throughout these vignettes. Moments like those provide plenty of levity while still delivering potent character insights.

One thing I especially appreciated was how Pooley uses the green notebook as an ingenious framing device to explore issues like alcoholism, body image, sexuality, parenting qualms – pretty much any topic where authenticity gets smothered by shame or fear of judgment. It’s a clever way to build a cohesive narrative world while offering intimate windows into relatable struggles.

Of course, as a sucker for meta-narratives, I was eating up the frequent reminders that we’re simply reading strangers’ raw confessions scribbled in this famous green notebook. Unreliable narrators having to confront the messy contradictions between how they view themselves versus how the world sees them? Yes please, sign me up! Pooley leans into this literary premise in cheeky ways, like when some notebook recipients voice skepticism over whether this “authenticity project” is merely a meaningless creative writing exercise.

But the more you become invested in these strangers baring their souls, the more you come to appreciate that yearning for authentic connection. Even for all the cringe-y oversharing, there’s something uplifting about people letting their guards down and being vulnerable about their hopes, failures, secrets. In an era when most communication gets flattened into emoji shorthand, reading these three-dimensional character portraits penned with such candor began to feel quietly radical.

And just when the notebook reaches peak skeptic territory with a prickly follow-up editor who rolls her eyes at the premise, Pooley deploys one final gut-punch twist revealing just how much these strangers’ stories impacted someone in need of hope. I won’t spoil it here, but let’s just say I very well may have finished the final pages with moistened cheeks. For such an unassuming novel, The Authenticity Project packs an emotional wallop.

Now did every single storyline land for me? If I’m being authentic, there were a few character arcs that fell flat, like the Instagram influencer following up with yet another Revolve #sponcon post hawking fast fashion after her supposed spiritual awakening. But that’s a fairly minor quibble when you consider the incredible tapestry Pooley wove here rendering modern human connection in all its gorgeous and flawed complexity.

At a time when most character-driven fiction feels more like a loose bundle of soapy storylines than a cohesive whole, I was continuously wowed by how these strangers’ confessions built upon each other into a sprawling yet unified narrative. Each contributor offered a unique facet of the authenticity gem refracting into a boldly humanistic statement. And while the plotlines follow fairly predictable uplifting arcs, rarely have I read something so pleasantly compulsive in having to know how it all resolves.

The Authenticity Project is one of those special novels where the premise is so clever and simple, yet rife with profound insights about how easily we lose sight of our genuine selves in this noisy, curated world. We’re all just messy works-in-progress aching to be truly seen, heard and understood without judgment. Great literature can act as a mirror for those rawest versions of ourselves gathering dust. This book holds up that mirror in the most compassionate yet unflinching of ways.

So now I’ll put the very premise to you, dear reader: Do you have the vulnerability and courage to let a little authenticity into your life? To be honest, the very notion terrifies me. But Pooley makes one hell of a compelling case for joining The Authenticity Project in these pages. Who knows, you might just reconnect with some long-neglected part of yourself along the way.