AOC, America’s youngest congresswoman, has already been compared with FDR and JFK

‘Who is AOC?’ the back cover of this book asks. ‘A wack job!’ says Donald Trump. ‘She needs to run for president when she turns 35,’ Cardi B explains. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest congresswoman in America. She goes by her initials (like FDR and JFK) and is

a Latina from the Bronx and Westchester, with no background in policy making, a bartender. She has a boyfriend; she uses social media to communicate with fans and fight with political foes, and also to cook ramen noodles in front of millions of people while chatting with them about structural inequality and mass incarceration. And every one of these things winds up meaning so much.

Take Up Space is a ‘kaleidoscopic biography’, assembled by the editors of New York magazine. The 32-year-old’s life takes up 200 pages and there are 22 additional, multimedia chapters, including a comic strip of her trip to ‘a “concentration camp” at the Border’, a copy of the speech she gave to Congress ‘On Being Called a F*cking B*tch’ and a two-page close-up photograph of her mouth.

The reader gains little impression of what AOC is like in an age when likes are what matter. (‘Politics had never had an influencer before. When Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that she liked Stila Stay All Day liquid lipstick in the color beso, it sold out at Sephora nationwide.’) The editors of New York breathlessly dissect her livestreams and Instagram account. Tweet threads are printed in full. ‘The video of her grilling Zuckerberg gives me life,’ says Capriana, 19, in a chapter called ‘What the Teens Say’. But real-life revelations are rare, and make no sense.

For instance, we are told AOC first entertains ‘the idealistic thought’ of quitting a medical degree for a politicised future while she is in Niger holding the hand of a 19-year-old who has just given birth, watching ‘the medical team try and fail to revive’ the girl’s stillborn baby.