Girl Online
The intenet and the self, Catherine Prasifka, Harriet Gibsone, Patricia Lockwood, and a reading update.
You may listen to me read this newsletter aloud, if you wish, here:
Hallo, it's me, Laura King. It’s typical that exactly one (1) week after I shared my cute pink to-be-read pile, I’m reporting that I went off track and read something completely different. I just couldn’t wait to get stuck into This Is How You Remember It by Catherine Prasifka, which comes out in May. I read the opening chapters right after I was approved to receive a digital advance copy, thinking it would fit in well with the theme I already had in mind for this week. However, I didn’t expect to spend all day Sunday and Monday evening mainlining it. Just like with Prasifka’s first novel, None of This Is Serious and Harriet Gibsone’s memoir Is This OK? I was struck by how the development of the self in these millennial women is not only marked by but goes hand-in-hand with their discovery of the online world, and their self presentation is ruled by the lessons they learn from the digital world. It also reminded me of No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood which is in large part written as a stream-of-consciousness experience of the world (and therefore the self) through social media.
Erving Goffman published The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life in 1959, and his ideas of perception management, and the concept of us all being actors or performers in social life, often juggling several “identities” or roles at once (sometimes known as “Theatre of Performance”) were widely referenced and accepted before the advent of social media. The idea of self-presentation is not a new one, and I find it frustrating that some people seem to think that conscious performance of the self is a direct result of access to the internet, though that certainly exacerbates it.
The books I’ve already mentioned are interesting to me because they are all written by women loosely in the millennial age bracket, and in these cases, like me, remember life without the internet and everyone having mobile phones, and a time before social media was quite as omnipresent. The books are explorations of children and young people figuring out who they are at the same time as all generations, together, were muddling through how to navigate the new and exciting digital world. All of these books, perhaps necessarily, end with a mediation on how to “break free” from addiction to, and unhealthy coping mechanisms via, the internet. In each case, grief and family love, particularly care for younger generations act as a catalyst for difficult but important change in each case of a healthier relationship with this new world.
This Is How You Remember It captures the early wonder and magic of the internet as experienced through a young child, finding pictures of nice pets and later developing innocent penpal-like relationships with other young people online. This gives way quite quickly to accessing disturbing adult material when she is far too young to understand it. Her seemingly quite free or unmonitored access to mature and pornographic material shapes her understanding of how her body should develop and how her adult relationships should look. This understandably has catastrophic effects on her interpersonal relationships as a teenager through to early adulthood, and the shame and humiliation that she faces at the hands of bullying peers is expedited by their access to devices that can record and broadcast her intimate moments.
The book is narrated in the second person, which is not something I have read very often. My friend Claire explained to me this week that there are a few ways to “do” second person, and my (possibly garbled) understanding of this is that it falls into a few main camps:
1. The format of a letter or narrative addressed to another character, “you”, which is kind of second person, but there’s still an “I” in there somewhere, even if not explicit
2. A character talking to themselves or
3. A sort of accusation or implication of the reader as part of the narrative
When I read This Is How You Remember It, I interpreted this choice as the protagonist trying to talk to her younger self, but across a huge divide which is before and after her discovery of the internet and computers, and before and after her finally developing a healthy boundary between the self, technology and social media. While I (thankfully) couldn’t relate to some of the more disturbing parts of this book as I was older than the protagonist by the time smartphones made access to the internet immediate and constant, I did find myself really identifying with some elements, or even realising even more clearly how this would have affected people not much younger than me. As Claire pointed out, in many places, the “You” makes for an accusatory feeling, like the character is saying “not just me, but you too”, and it makes for an uncomfortable but also very addictive reading experience.
Prasifka uses a strange, yet I think effective, device that is sort of like magical realism in both of her novels that gives a unique dimension to relatable narratives. In This Is How You Remember It, the protagonist notices her body change dramatically after a traumatic incident in her early teens she becomes obsessed with hiding that even from the people closest to her, presenting a much more composed mask to the outside world to hide and almost eradicate the essence of who she really is.
Her first book, None of This Is Serious, is another 'coming of age on the internet' novel with a twist, in that it is set during an alternative world wide event - a shooting star that causes a crack in the sky instead of a virus, but readers will recognise much the same reactions, hot takes and strange mix of hysteria, black humour and ennui we saw online at onset of the coronavirus pandemic. I love that it is still a book about the pandemic, but not as we know it. It is more about popular response, division, and terror while living everyday life, and everyday problems too, viewed almost completely through the main character’s smartphone use.
While Prasifka uses such interesting devices to better illustrate what is going on under the surface of her novels, Harriet Gibsone’s Is This Ok? is a more direct exploration of what it is to “grow up online”, and how the arrival of the internet in her pre-teens enabled and exacerbated some of the things she would have experienced anyway. For Gibsone, surveillance of other people as a means of entertainment, as well as a way to understand herself and how she was supposed to behave was a big part of her childhood, and of course she was delighted by her ability to access this even more easily once she joined social media. The fact I knew this was non-fiction made me cringe deeply at different parts, and Gibsone’s narration on the audiobook is so funny even in very embarrassing passages.
The book mostly has a humorous or tongue-in-cheek tone, but there's a serious weight to how she explores learning how to present herself in real life and online, and how the two were more intermingled than older generations realised. It’s a real chronicle of the time she grew up in, as well as her own story, about the emo era on MySpace and then being a young adult hipster working in music journalism in the early days of Twitter, playing the part of musical muse or alternatively, part of the hedonistic indie-sleeze party scene. The book is told mostly through the lens of an addiction to or dependency on the internet, but also with romantic obsession which fueled a low self-esteem and body issues and “the shame, the shame of giving too much and loving too hard.”
The tone of the essays vary widely from the mad, hilarious daydream of a life with Gibsone’s longtime crush and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, to some really moving and hard to read passages on Gibsone’s health and fertility issues, through to the traumatic birth of her beloved son after undergoing difficult treatments. In these hard times she falls back on her old crutch of the internet and comparing herself to women and mothers who seem to have it all, and vicariously living through people she only knows as avatars. Like the character at the end of Prasifka’s novels, she starts to understand that she will have to completely rewire her attitudes towards herself and her body, and how she understands people and the world around her through the internet, and while this will be difficult to break away from the unhealthy attachment to something that in some ways brought her many good things in her life, she does not want to be defined by it especially as she begins to raise a young boy who will grow up never knowing the world without the internet at his fingertips.
Patricia Lockwood, in her novel No One Is Talking About This, takes the idea of understanding and forming the self through the internet a step further by narrating the first half of her novel in a stream-of-consciousness that allows us access to the mind of the character who experiences the world, even the mundanity of getting up in the morning and showering, through the language of Twitter, which here is called “The Portal”. This technique is jarring as you get used to it, but gradually I began to feel like this is the only way to adequately talk about life lived online, where the seemingly shared hive mind on social media networks becomes enmeshed with the individual's thoughts and experiences "offline". As Lockwood’s character wonders, “What about the stream of consciousness that was not entirely your own? One that you participate in but that also acts upon you?"
In the first half of the book, you feel like the jokes and trends and arguments online are more real than the main character's actual life, and it makes for a mad reading experience, but one that is irreverent, absurd and hilarious. However, things take a sharp turn as a family emergency arises and it is a complete shock to the reader as everything changes. This event also severs the stream-of-consciousness and a new type of narrative style emerges that is not as deeply rooted in online culture.I didn’t realise until after I finished the book that this is based on a real event in Lockwood’s family after her niece was born, and the realisation that this book was a kind of work of autofiction made me very emotional and admire the book even more. This complete change in tone and language elevates the book from a fascinating yet still funny exploration of online culture to a complex work of real honesty and tenderness unlike anything I'd read before.
Reading Update
Physical book: I’ve just started Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson which is a highly anticipated novel coming out in April. Gleeson is a respected journalist, editor and broadcaster, and her book of personal essays, Constellations, was a triumph so I can’t wait to read her first novel.
e-Book: Big Date Energy by Bethany Rutter comes out in February and is the perfect book for me to dip in and out of at bedtime.
Audiobook: I’ve just finished Rouge by Mona Awad, and while I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of elements that reminded me of All’s Well and Bunny, like her earlier books this novel gets very lost towards the end (I accidentally skipped a good few chapters and it took me a while to notice). Still, there’s a lot of food for thought here and I’ll explore it more next week.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me next week for a new instalment of LauraEatsBooks… Mirror, Mirror.