Issue #11: My interview with an influencer
How a former viral housewife turned single writer goes beyond TikTok
Welcome to the Thursday installment of platonic love, where we cover topics like the difference between solo and “single” travel, my recent decision to stop drinking, and building attachment (slowly) to your newborn.
This week, we’re talking to influencer Hannah Stella.
Hannah Stella is not a stay-at-home wife — anymore. But she was in December 2020, when she posted her first TikTok: #DIML as a housewife with no kids.
It went viral, sparking a new genre of influencers: upper-class women without children or jobs, who spend their time shopping, perfecting their appearance (boutique fitness classes, facials, and Botox are all incredibly common), and managing the home and social calendar of their relationship.
I first started following Hannah because it was fascinating to see a life parallel to, but so different from, my own. She didn’t come from money, yet she was now a member of the .001%. Despite the unrelatability of her lifestyle, Hannah’s humorous observations and acute dissections of the world around her made her feel like a friend… a very, very well-dressed one.
I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Hannah’s TikTok audience grew rapidly (she now has more than 172,000 followers).
Her life — and corresponding “brand” — evolved just as quickly. Since announcing her separation from her husband in July 2022, she has left New York, started a successful newsletter, bought a catamaran, sailed around the Bahamas, and moved back to New York.
And that’s where we kicked things off.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Aja Frost: When you first started posting on TikTok, did you ever consider the potential consequences?
Hannah Stella: After the first video I posted went quite viral, I was like, all right, in for a pence, in for a pound.
But no, I didn't. I wish that I had, but to think through the consequences of having a following, you have to assume that you’ll get one.
Aja: Which the average person should not!
I'm not saying this applies to me specifically, but I think to build a social media following, you need to be a level of charismatic most people aren’t. And incredibly lucky on top of that.
Aja: Yeah, the confluence of those two things is rare.
How long have you been in New York, and why did you move and then come back?
I’ve been living in New York for about 14 years. I was a housewife — like an actual, real housewife. My ex-husband was working, and I was managing our houses. Mostly hanging out, talking through business stuff with him, and existing.
For reasons I won’t get into, we got divorced.
I didn't know what I wanted to do next, because I had nothing anchoring me to a certain place. At the time, I believed it would be disappointing to stay in New York but live in a different way. (I was wrong about that.)
Aja: What did you do?
For some years, I’d been thinking about learning to sail, so I bought a sailing catamaran and lived mostly in the Bahamas for six months. I'm grateful for that experience — it was really cool and unique, and you can see so much on a boat that you can’t see on land.
However, living on a boat was not the lifestyle I wanted long term. I thought it would be a healthy reset. But living on a boat is actually very, very social. It's a lot of drinking. More like camping and less like being on vacation. I am happy to go camping for a weekend. Not all the time.
So, I decided to sell the boat — it’s still for sale, but two people have said they’re going to make offers — and move back to the city.
Aja: You seem like someone who doesn't have traditional regrets. You just described several different life turning points that happened pretty quickly — but not as mistakes. You wanted to know if something was true, so you tested it and got your answer.
That perspective is hard-earned. When I moved to New York, I was incredibly sick. I was severely bulimic, and separately, I never had parents who taught me how to behave. And so I was chaotic and really not that nice to people.
I struggled for a long time with regret about that period. But as I was grappling with this regret, I was simultaneously happy with how my life had turned out. I realized if I had acted differently in those situations, I probably wouldn't have ended up where I was.
I was talking to my therapist when I was deciding whether or not to get divorced. I don't get emotional very often, but I got very, very emotional. I was telling her that as a kid I had so much potential — but nobody ever made me live up to that potential.
This is sort of silly: I could sprint really, really fast. Yet I never did track and field or any of that stuff. Nobody ever said, “You have a talent for this; you need to pursue it.”
Through therapy, I’ve learned I wouldn’t be the person I am now without the experiences I’ve had. If I like that person, I shouldn’t regret those experiences. That’s been freeing.
Aja: You used the word “chaotic.” In your writing, you’ve talked about reacting strongly to being labeled chaotic or “crazy.” Where does that come from?
It's a way to completely invalidate what someone is saying.
Some people are crazy. They’re mentally unstable, and that's something they need help with.
I have been “crazy” in that sense in the past. I am not crazy now.
Through therapy, I’ve learned I wouldn’t be the person I am now without the experiences I’ve had. If I like that person, I shouldn’t regret those experiences. That’s been freeing.
I also get very frustrated whenever people willfully misinterpret things. It’s an incredibly condescending and lazy way to argue with people.
Whenever you tell somebody that they're not making sense, you are making it impossible for them to actually have a conversation with you. There's nowhere to go from there.
Aja: Was it hard for people to separate your divorce and the implications of that choice from their choices?
On the Internet, I have noticed a phenomenon that extends beyond me. When somebody says, “This is what I'm doing, or “This is my experience,” people feel like they're condemning everybody who makes a different choice or has any other experience. And that's not true.
Aja: I talk about this with my friends a lot — all nuance is leaving the conversation. There's no good for you, not for me. It's, If you're doing this, you're declaring that this is the way to live.
I completely agree.
Aja: A lot of that hate or willful misinterpretation of what you’re saying is happening on Reddit. It’s an interesting dynamic: most of the people in these online hate communities picking apart women are women.
It comes across my desk whenever it gets out of control or somebody is being mean and sending it to me. Even when somebody sends me a link, I don't click it. I haven't looked at it at all in almost a year, because it's not something that exists for me to consume.
I suspect that people who are participating in these communities feel like they're texting their friends. You know, who among us has not taken a screenshot of something? My friend texted me a screenshot of someone else the other day. It was harmless. I think it’s a part of human nature and female friendship that is not going to go away or change.
But you're not actually texting your friends. You're posting things publicly and in conversation with strangers.
When you're speaking with your actual friends, whenever you cross a line and it goes beyond silly and into vitriol, your friends will call you out. In online communities, I don't think that feedback happens.
I believe these communities exist with the idea of holding people accountable, and if that's really what's happening, it could be valuable. But it’s not happening in a way where the person is receiving constructive feedback. None of the feedback I've gotten, especially from Reddit, is phrased in a way that’s productive.
If you’re going to say what I'm posting is harmful, you need to be mature enough to say it respectfully. If you can’t do that, I'm not going to listen to you.
Aja: Right, when you’re gossiping with friends, there is a system of checks and balances. Someone might say, “Hey, you're talking about this person too much. That's weird.” In anonymous forums, obsessive behavior is almost rewarded.
The “we’re in a group chat” mentality can get dangerous. Recently, someone on Reddit posted my New York address. In New York, it's relatively easy to find people's addresses. That’s a fact of living here. But there's a difference between something being easy to find and posting it online. We don't know who we're sharing information with.
For example, a sexual stalker was breaking into my house in Idaho. They’d take my underwear. My housekeepers would find my nightgowns balled up with semen and pubic hair in them.
That was really scary.
Aja: That’s so scary. I’m sorry.
Despite that, you’ve mentioned you're enjoying living alone.
It's nice to be able to do what I want to do. I've never had this kind of freedom before.
I feel safe living alone. I usually don’t have a lot of anxiety about my physical safety, for better or worse.
It’s actually gotten me into some bad situations. I ended up on a boat last fall with these guys who were saying that they used to dispose of bodies for the Mafia. And it was like, Oh, my God! Hannah, you've got to develop some life instincts.
Aja: Yeah, that's one of those moments where you come to, and you're like, Oh, shit.
Aliza and I frequently write about self-identity and friendship. Those things feel separate, but they're intertwined. How do you see your identity influencing your relationships and community?
When you have a strong sense of yourself, it makes you a much better friend — because you automatically stop doing that defensive comparison thing. You can speak to other people and hear their stories and experiences without feeling like the stories and those experiences are a mirror in a bad way.
Vulnerability is a real tool in friendships. Let’s say you really want to be married and have kids and one of your close friends is married and pregnant. If you can approach that situation with vulnerability instead of defensiveness and say, “I really care about you, and I'm also so envious that you have these things that I don't have” — if you're in a place to do that — it can bring you much closer.
Aja: Right. Rather than pulling away, not having that conversation, and letting the friendship weaken as a result.
That's a big ask. I'm not saying that I'm perfectly enlightened in that way. But I think it's a good goal.
Aja: I want to hear about the book that you're writing.
(Laughing.) I hope that it sells because I've talked about it so much, and it’ll be embarrassing if it doesn't.
I'm writing a memoir focused on the last 18 to 24 months of my life. It's about the experience of divorce without kids and some of the specifics of what happened in my relationship, which I know people have wanted me to talk about online.
And I'm not going to write out a script and tell the messiest story of my life on TikTok. I'm just not doing it.
I think there is a perception, “Oh, you'll do it for a check, but not for free.” And I would say, first, yeah, that's completely fair.
Aja: (Laughing.) Yes!
Second, it's much more difficult to take the written word out of context.
Whenever you write, if you're trying to do a good job and write from an honest place, you’re doing a lot of self-reflection and revision, checking in with friends, looking back through old journals and texts, and speaking to the people who were in those situations. You're portraying reality as you experienced it.
It can be very difficult to do that when you're speaking — which isn't to say that people are lying. But I think that difficult topics warrant a degree of reflection that is difficult to do without writing out a script. And I'm not going to write out a script and tell the messiest story of my life on TikTok. I'm just not doing it.
If you enjoyed this interview with Hannah, you might like:
Why I’ve decided to stop drinking: my essay on being (mostly) sober.
Pumping while flying: Aliza’s first postpartum bachelorette trip.
Enthusiasm is never uncool: learning to be comfortable with vulnerability.
We’ll be back on Monday with a roundup of the links we’ve sent our friends.
Love, Aja
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me!! It was so fun!!!