TikToker Drew Afualo on How She Found Her Confidence

Since early 2020, the content creator Drew Afualo has made a name for herself online by expertly taking down misogynists through cutting roasts. See, for example, her recent response to a right-wing commentary YouTuber Pearl Davis (also known as JustPearlyThings), who hurled fatphobic and racist comments at Afualo and her boyfriend, which proved that her roasts are rated E for everyone, not just men.

Afualo, 28, doesn’t give the words of bigots and misogynists the power to hurt her feelings because she’s built up her own self-confidence. Her perfect blend of mean, funny, and quick-witted commentary taking down people who act awful online has brought her over eight million followers on TikTok and one million on Instagram. Her self-assuredness comes through across the handful of videos she posts on TikTok each week.

In her new book Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve, Afualo reflects on her life and her relationships, tracing the experiences that have made her so confident. “All the things that make me confident, that make me love myself, that made me think of the baddest bitch alive, have nothing to do with what I look like,” she tells TIME. Billed as “part manual, part manifesto, and part memoir,” Loud also lays out tools to help anyone who is “not an awful man” decenter patriarchy.

 “Patriarchy influences so many different levels of bigotry, and it stands alongside different levels of bigotry,” Afualo says. “It influences everything we think we love, like the way you talk, do your makeup, do your hair, the music you listen to, the movies you watch, and the media you consume. All of that could be influenced by men perceiving it as awesome.”

Afualo is speaking from her home office, located an hour outside Los Angeles, as she gets ready to put Loud out in the world. The same day it publishes, she will embark on a country-wide tour to celebrate the launch with her sister Deison, with whom she co-hosts the podcast Two Idiot Girls. “I’m tired, but excited,” she says. “I’m a Virgo, so I thrive when I work.” 

A child of the internet, Afualo is no stranger to books written by influencers. It was a growing trend in the early 2010s when content creators were breaking out of the confines of the internet and pivoting into the mainstream. YouTubers like Tyler Oakley, Zoe Sugg (Zoella), Tanya Burr, and Alfie Deyes have all written books—some are non-fiction, while others toyed with fiction. This trend has declined over the years as popular creators who reached mainstream success wrote books that were perceived as inauthentic.

At first, Afualo rejected the idea of writing a book. “I’m just a silly jester online, and it felt like an influencer book or a memoir, and I didn’t think my words were important enough to warrant being published.” But she warmed up to the idea after speaking to several publishers at the end of 2022. They told her that a book was an opportunity for her to expand on the beliefs and ideologies that she can’t always capture in short clips on the internet. (Although, these days, she uses TikTok’s 10-minute video feature, which she says gives her “way too much room to yap.”)

Eventually, she accepted a publishing deal with Questlove’s imprint Auwa Books, under Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. “I don’t think she’s a flash in the pan,” says Questlove, who found Afualo’s content during the pandemic. “I told her that she has a voice and that I think when you capture that lightning in a bottle via writing, that is a way to preserve it forever.” Writing and revising what became Loud was a totally different creative process for Afualo, as she figured out what exactly she wanted to say—while also continuing her TikTok presence and podcasts, which all involved her talking at length every week. “It was nothing but me yapping and writing,” she says.

Throughout the book, Afualo delves into different parts of her life that shaped her. From a young age, she learned to lean on her Samoan family for support while experiencing the discomfort of growing up as a person of color who does not fit into Eurocentric beauty standards. She credits her mother for shaping her beliefs and self-confidence, putting together the pieces of who she is today. In one part of the book, Afualo writes about comparing herself to one of her white friends who is a lot smaller than her. But her mother stopped that insecurity from festering, telling her, “You’re never going to look like her. But that’s not a bad thing, and it doesn’t make you uglier.”

Some chapters took longer than others to write, she says, because they required her to confront more challenging and difficult moments in her life, like her admittedly not-so-great reaction to her sister coming out to her. “In the initial stages of writing about these things, I wasn’t being as vulnerable as I could have been because I do get nervous about that,” she says. Her editor would gently nudge her and ask her to pull out more from the experience, which Afualo says she was grateful for because otherwise, she knew she was being superficial. “I feel like when you want to have vulnerable conversations, but you're unwilling to be vulnerable, you sound like an asshole."

The hardest chapter to write was about, she says, was her pregnancy scare in 2020. She shares in the book that she'd had conversations with her boyfriend, Pili, and that he knew she didn’t want to have kids. After a test indicated she was pregnant, they rode silently together to the abortion clinic, she writes. Before the procedure, she took another test, and it turned out that the initial result had been a false positive. “I realized that I didn’t want to become a mom, but my mom,” she writes.

Afualo says, “I remember when I wrote that line, I started crying,” she says. “I was unpacking it while I was writing it.” She recently told her mom and her sister about that part in the book, and they all started crying together. Recording the audiobook wasn’t any easier. During the recording session, she frequently paused to collect herself while reading the chapter. “I know I’m a mean bitch online, but I am a Cancer moon, so I’m a big softie in a lot of ways," she says.

Afualo has always been a fan of self-help books and wanted to write something in that zone, though she notes she is not an expert in psychology. “The only thing I'm an expert in is my lived experience in specifically unpacking a lot of my own internalized biases, my own internalized prejudice," she says, "And how that led me to a place in my life where I can completely decenter men and walk in a confidence that is solely based on how I see myself and not how men perceive me."

It is this astute vision for herself that makes Afualo, as Questlove puts it, “the voice of millions of women everywhere who are tired of the fuckery.”