Is This OK?: One Woman's Search For Connection Online

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I loved this book because it is SO relatable. Harriet is only a few years older than me, so I felt like I had a very similar experience of the world and pop culture growing up – the nostalgia really hit me reading this! But what really captivated me was Harriet’s unfiltered honesty and authenticity, as she fearlessly shared the highs and lows that many women can relate to. It is a connection to a very adult world, an exercise in anthropology. To follow the couple’s every move, even though they aren’t the demographic we are typically interested in, is mesmerising. It is an ambient, almost meditative experience that creates a silent sense of camaraderie between us. Harriet the Spy is a 1964 childrens’ book about a little girl who snoops relentlessly on her neighbours. Harriet Gibsone did the same thing when she was young. Now in her late 30s, she still shares with the fictional Harriet a powerful imagination and endless fascination with others. Harriet the Spy was banned in a number of American schools; apparently morally upright people didn’t approve of watchful girls trying to figure out the world on their own terms. I love these characters, nurturing as they do some feeling of control in a world where they do not have any. Honestly, I feel like the author's real problem is that she spends so much time reading about the seemingly amazing lives of others and taking it as gospel that she forgot to live much outside of the typical awkward experiences that everyone goes through, thus making everyone else seem even more interesting, leading to more stalking. Does she really believe Deliciously Ella's overly perfect birth story? Suddenly staring down years of IVF, HRT and other invasive medical treatments, her relationship with the internet takes a darker turn, as her online addictions are thrown into sharp relief by the corporeal realities of illness and motherhood.

We rush into the hospital so they can implant it into my womb immediately. Two weeks pass. On the 14th day we do a pregnancy test. I’m not pregnant. I call my sister to tell her the bad news. As life has evolved, there has been a constant stream of objects of lust and intrigue, each of which has warped my interior world during a crisis. Take puppy-dog stadium pop-god Chris Martin. The Coldplay frontman has enjoyed a 20-year residency in the front of my brain. Imagined scenarios of us together on Christmas Day or schmoozing side by side at a celebrity shindig have dragged me through the drabbest afternoons. as a writer myself, I found myself relating so heavily to Harriet's experiences with people she obsesses over online and thinks are too amazing and beautiful and talented to ever live up to. she's constantly acutely aware of her own feelings of imposter syndrome, feeling too basic, untalented, and stupid... always comparing herself to those around her who seem to be able to have original ideas and know how to pull the right words from their brain always at the right times, while she's too busy looking at these people for the right opinions so she can then somehow try to craft her own work and tweets. based on this book alone, however, it's exceptionally clear that Harriet is absolutely not a fake: she's the real deal and she's got the talent to prove it—even if it writing about her own life in this way is what took her to truly find it. I've seldom seen such extreme soul-bearing and admission of dysfunctional behaviour. It's a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash.While the overall theme of the book is internet culture, and the authors relationship to that, it also has a pretty interesting look into the indie music scene of 2007-2010, as she was working for a free music magazine during that time period.

When I started reading 'Is this OK?' I wasn't at all sure I'd make it to the end. I found the style rather irritating and I wasn't even sure at first if it was fiction or autobiography. Once I'd settled in, and as Harriet got older, I became a lot more interested in her life. It appears that Harriet Gibsone has spent her entire life trying to turn herself into the various people she obsessively follows online, from fellow-journalist colleagues like ‘Laura’ to celebrities like Alexa Chung. It made me feel really sad, because Harriet – as presented through her own words – seems perfectly lovely and lovable if she could only set aside those obsessive thoughts. The word “threat” is well chosen. Gibsone’s early romantic and sexual relationships are troubled. Some verge on abusive, and she turns the pain they inflict inwards. She torments herself with hunger, alcohol, and generally abnegates herself to meet others’ needs. Though drawn to music and art, she is not yet able to claim the power to create for herself. It’s comforting to know that this book is proof of her ultimate success in that respect. But it comes slowly. At first, instead of nurturing her own creativity, she makes a career out of tending to that flame in others. She becomes a music and culture editor at the Guardian, where she remains a contributor. Hoodwinking her audience into thinking she is flawed and chaotic, just as susceptible to heartache and humiliation as the rest of us. Using her alleged inadequacies to puncture the veneer of superiority and manipulate the public into investing in her. It’s a classic trait of a good old-fashioned people-pleaser, fearful of the displeasure of others, willing to throw oneself under the bus in a plea for connection, approval and love. Suddenly, with a diagnosis of early menopause in her late twenties, her relationship with the internet takes a darker turn, as her online addictions are thrown into sharp relief by the corporeal realities of illness and motherhood.

I was 19 and in the market for a new idol when I first saw her bounce on screen with Popworld co-star Alex Zane in the mid-00s. Within months her reign as one of the last true “It” girls had begun – a force of style and personality that would later catapult her to America, launch her clothing brand and create the type of hype and mystique normally preserved by pop stars, or a natural deodorant that actually works. Brandon Taylor’s second novel follows the Booker-shortlisted Real Life. It gathers a loose community of friends, lovers, coursemates and rivals around the University of Iowa in chapters told from alternating perspectives: an incidental character from one will be the main character in the next. The plot is minimal. These “Late Americans” – as Seamus, an acerbic, uncompromising poet, calls them – fall together and apart, a persistent melancholy apparent in these beginnings and endings. Sometimes Taylor seems to strain for this mood, isolating sentences as paragraphs and words as sentences.