By the looks of it, Christina “Tinx” Najjar’s fiction debut, Hotter in the Hamptons, is guaranteed to be a smash success. On shelves May 6, the bisexual romance novel follows a New York City “It” girl who flees to the Hamptons after a withering cultural critic destroys her reputation — only to discover that her new neighbor in the Hamptons is said cultural critic. An amorous affair ensues.
It’s a juicy conceit, and the 34-year-old social-media personality, who has built a multimillion-dollar brand as “TikTok’s older sister,” has plenty of promotional tools at her disposal. She has millions of followers, a pop-culture podcast, and a SiriusXM radio show. She is already a New York Times best-selling author for the 2022 self-help book The Shift: Change Your Perspective, Not Yourself. In February, Hotter in the Hamptons was optioned for TV by 20th Television with Nobody Wants This producer duo Sara and Erin Foster set to adapt it.
Now drama is brewing around the release. On Thursday, writer and Ph.D. student Maalvika Bhat posted a TikTok revealing that Tinx used a ghostwriter, novelist and former Nylon editor-in-chief Gabrielle Korn. (Hotter in the Hamptons is listed on Korn’s website under “Manuscript Services.”) “What does it say about the publishing world when identity is only marketable when it’s filtered through someone already profitable?” Bhat asked, taking issue with the fact that Tinx, who is straight, is trying to pass a queer novel written by a queer ghostwriter as her own. Other TikTokers chimed in to agree, and the debate has made its way to Reddit.
@maaltoks and if this video disappears at some point, hypothetically, it’s probably because someone out there has a very powerful legal team
Tinx commented on the video: “Of course I hired a collaborator who’s queer … I am not a lesbian. I wanted to nail that part of the storyline. It’s not a secret, she’s the first person I thank in the acknowledgments!” Bhat replied with receipts, sharing a transcript of a podcast on which Tinx claimed she did not use a ghostwriter for the novel. “I’m earnestly asking, if queerness is not your lived experience and you need a queer ghostwriter to capture the nuances of queer intimacy and joy and identity, why not amplify the writer?” Bhat questioned.
It is standard practice for famous people to commission ghostwriters to help write memoirs — fiction less so, though it is not unprecedented. (Remember when Kendall and Kylie Jenner “wrote” a YA book?) A vanity project like Hotter in the Hamptons is only moderately compelling as a peek into Tinx herself — her humor, her sensibility. Tinx, it must be said, graduated from Stanford, where she studied English literature and creative writing. Surely, she could have written the book. (And why not just make it a heterosexual romance? Those sell too.) If anything, this whole saga is just a little embarrassing.
The Cut has reached out to both Tinx and Korn for comment and will update this post if we receive a response.
