“I think she is self-aware about what she can do and what she doesn’t want to do,” Mr. Abdalla said. “She’s also pretty good at throwing a party. That’s a pretty big part of this job. She can get people to show up.”
“It took me two years to embrace being a publicist,” Ms. Phillips says. “In my mind I was like, ‘I’m going to pay off my student loans and then I’m going to go back to writing.’ I was not invested in my clients. I was not interested in being a publicist, branding as a publicist, letting anyone know I was a publicist. I just knew that they were dumber than writers and then all of the sudden I was that person. And then I realized I was good at it. Like, better than other publicists. And then I realized that if I placed a big story I’d get the same rush I’d get when I’d written something.”
And P.R. didn’t stop her from being the character she had begun to create in n+1: She could still be madcap, screwball, horny. She could still be the girl with the roll of quarters, the main character in the story she’s now getting paid to spin. For Ms. Phillips and her friends, an endless stream of suggestive social media posts is just as good, if not better, as a movie or a play or existence in bound book.
Ms. Phillips aggressively tried to spin this piece, before I had even finished transcribing my notes, even as she insisted to me in an email that she had never, even once, been embarrassed. Several times when I emailed a secondary source — a client, a friend — to set up a short interview, she would post my email on her Instagram feed: a move, I can only imagine, intended to communicate that she was in control.
And then: a flood of articles came out about Dimes Square, the downtown scene she was playing a role in mythologizing. She seemed to lack her usual certitude when it came to how she would like to play her relationship with that scene. She suggested a profile of her would be the nail in the coffin of the whole thing.
“There’s something cringe about me,” she wrote on Twitter, “but there’s even something more cringe about caring about me.”
