A dozen pages into the staggering, spectacular Facebook exposé Careless People, I launch my fantasy casting process. Who should play its whistleblowing heroine, Sarah Wynn-Williams, the New Zealand diplomat turned director of global public policy at Facebook – now Meta – in the screen adaptation we surely deserve?
I whittle it down to a shortlist of two: Thomasin McKenzie, the best young actor I know from New Zealand, and the US star Sydney Sweeney, who has form conveying the sort of contained stress and defensive drollery required.
That McKenzie and Sweeney both have body horrors on their CVs should also come in handy, because a surprising amount of this memoir reads like body horror, and that is precisely the market any adaptation should target.
It starts with a shark attack that leaves a teenage Wynn-Williams with stitched-up jaw marks across her stomach and an undiagnosed perforated bowel. As she deteriorates, her breathing difficulties are greeted with the parental assurance that all she has to do is put “mind over matter”. Alas, it’s no strategy for defeating sepsis and acute peritonitis.
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She is instead subjected to the kind of terrifying anaesthetic-free emergency medical interventions that made her think she was awake for her own autopsy. I’m holding back here, but trust me, any self-respecting screen version would instantly secure an 18 certificate.
So, yes, a book about working at a senior level of Facebook during its see-no-evil global expansion opens with a story about swimming with sharks.
It would seem far too on-the-nose a metaphor, only Wynn-Williams has recounted it before, anonymously, on a 2012 episode of the podcast This American Life. She hasn’t waited to roll it out as a convenient analogy for the relentlessness of elite power plays or the complacency of governments and regulators in the face of social media harms.
She doesn’t explicitly spell out such links in Careless People anyway. That might be unfair to sharks.
[ Meta wins emergency ruling to temporarily stop promotion of tell-all bookOpens in new window ]
The incident is far from the only one in this instant bestseller to trade in visceral body horror. Close to the end of her Facebook tenure, she’s stung on the backs of both knees by wasps, forcing her to drop to the dirty ground in her white corporate dress. All she can do is drag herself to her car, “part human, part wasp swarm”.
The venom causes her skin to “redden, swell and throb hot with pain”, but she stops trying to prevent the stings. “It doesn’t matter what I do; I’m outmanoeuvred, overpowered, overwhelmed,” she writes. Online content moderators will relate.
Her other enduring foes are the workaholic bosses whose demands here make Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada seem easy-going. Her waters broken, she is about to have her first baby, but, over on another continent, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg, is unexpectedly heading into a meeting with the president of Brazil. For Wynn-Williams, leaning in apparently means emailing Sandberg some suggested talking points from the delivery room.
After the birth of her second daughter, the conflict between her mortality and her tech-cult existence intensifies. She has an amniotic-fluid embolism, goes into a coma and wakes up on a ventilator, unable to make herself heard. Heavy blood loss continues after she is discharged from hospital, but her American employers seem to have a hazy understanding of the concept of maternity leave. On her return, she claims, she is scolded for not being responsive enough.
Meta says that Careless People, which is published by Pan Macmillan, contains “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”. That’s the legal rub. But if future adaptors are worried about expensive skirmishes with Facebook’s billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg, or any of the others who come out of this poorly, they can always sidestep the flashpoints by zooming in on Careless People’s deliberate thread of body horror.
This would not only avoid watering down the wider sense of villainy but also tap into the commercial appeal of an in-vogue genre. This year alone has seen Coralie Fargeat’s bloodfest The Substance showered with five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture, while the wildly unsettling Severance, no stranger to body horror, is Apple’s biggest and most talked-about series. It’s still only March.
Body horror is popular because it riffs on tensions between flesh and tech that aren’t going away. Boundaries that once seemed immutable are being breached. Our humanity is not inviolable, our digital cocoons are not complete.
A long 15 years ago, David Fincher’s film The Social Network depicted the origins of Facebook without squeezing in any body horror at all, unless you count the spectre of Armie Hammer playing twins.
The compelling Careless People is an obvious blueprint for the gruesome cinematic companion piece we now need to illustrate how much of what has happened since is absurd, and how all of it is grotesque.
