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

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Harriet spent much of her young life feeding neuroses and insecurities with obsessive internet searching (including compulsive googling of exes, prospective partners, and their exes), and indulging in whirlwind 'parasocial relationships' (translation: one-sided affairs with celebrities she has never met). 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. In the weeks after the test, my husband can see I am struggling. He is, too. I can’t face putting Libby through it again; it’s a lot of time and physical and emotional labour. At this stage we are introduced to Dr Luca Sabatini by Debbie. A clean, strong, pragmatic Italian man, who is a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist. My hero. For the next few months, she is my secret guru. This steady, nurturing approach is essential for the baby’s growth, but it’s unfamiliar to me. After many years of using food as some form of punishment, restricting it, removing it from my body, and having little faith in my ability to look after myself, or that my body even works in the way it should, I am depending on Ella to teach us both how to survive. 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.

Laugh-out-loud-on-the-train funny . . . swings between silliness and profundity . . . This is a book to hold on to and one to share, a warning and a map created by a watchful girl, telling others what may lie ahead -- Maeve Higgins, GuardianWe 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. I'm glad I don't know her - or perhaps I'm more glad I was never the ex-girlfriend of somebody she was obsessed with - but I found the book to be oddly endearing, the deeper I got into it. Nine decades after JB Priestley’s English Journey presented his influential sketches of life beyond London, Stuart Maconie has retrodden the route for a 2020s update. Swapping Priestley’s chauffeured Daimler for trains and buses, and boiled-beef dinners for prawn puris, Maconie maps progress via topographies of vibrancy and decline. Like his hero, he leaves nothing un-flâneured, reporting on food and fashions, potholes and pub-life, and the bearing of folk as he finds them. Then, at 31, she started to experience symptoms she couldn’t make sense of: forgetfulness, mysterious mood swings and bouts of weeping, and being woken in the night by sudden hot flushes. The sudden bursts of aggression made her feel like Piers Morgan. Her world was crumbling – but nobody could tell her exactly what was wrong. There are members of the network in their teens, some with no symptoms, and others who have been diagnosed much later, living with the destabilising symptoms for most of their adult lives. I attend a couple of group sessions at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital – there are doctors there who do Q&As about fertility and hormones. Those women are there – the ones who demand answers – and boy, do they get results. I just want to ask everyone if they are OK. In one of the meetings about POI’s emotional toll, we are all given a leaf to hold. I’m not quite sure why, but it’s nice, and for a few moments we sit in silence and feel connected by our grief. Social media is a hellscape: I mute friends who have got pregnant by accident. I avoid seeing people who have children

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. A few months pass and, at my 28-week appointment my midwife generously asks about a birthing plan, and we are encouraged to draw up a list of requirements to ensure tranquillity and focus. Like a projector showing a Glyndebourne live stream and access to a qualified reiki instructor, for example. But not me. Not little old low-maintenance, delicate angel me. “Just get the baby out of me alive!” I jest, nervously, and she looks relieved. Her social media output suggests her child’s birth was a slightly intense poo in a paddling pool, while ours was murderous Brain fog leaves me exhausted and unable to form a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. I haven’t had a period for a year Eventually my preoccupations with other people’s lives would expand to include those with a public profile, too – people on TV, in films, musicians and, in later years, influencers. I’d come to discover this has a name: parasocial relationships, the dynamic where a “normal” person feels strongly towards a famous person. The term originated in 1956 to refer to the relationship between viewers and television personalities, and has become more widespread over the past decade due to fanatical “Stan” culture and the superficial notion that we have 24-hour access to the lives of public figures via social media and reality shows.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. what I love the most about this book—aside from the entire chapter dedicated to being obsessed with Alexa Chung—is the humour, relatability, and vulnerability. there were several times I laughed out loud and then couldn't stop giggling at the absurd situations Harriet described, and the hilarious sentences she strung together. these remain present even as the book becomes darker when Harriet discusses her experiences with early menopause, a difficult pregnancy, and a traumatic birth that left her with PTSD. I experiences many emotions while reading this, both happy and sad, but it ultimately felt like a warm hug from a friend who understands. We're looking forward to welcoming Harriet Gibsone to the bookshop for an event to celebrate her upcoming memoir, Is This OK? This painfully hilarious book follows the author as she navigates the internet in search of connection. Harriet will be in conversation with fellow writer Anahit Behrooz.

Just read this from its giggly heights to its mortifying depths . . . I feel like I've been through something. Something really worth going through. -- Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Featured Reviews

My baby,” I cry, as he is raised from between my legs and immediately moved on to a table. The doctors huddle around his body. Mark is devastated. The baby is unresponsive, blue and limp. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” I tell Mark. I am as high as a kite from the epidural, but I am certain, from the depths of my soul, that he will survive. Mark puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s OK,” I smile. This is an unflinching look into one woman’s internet habits, and while I don’t think it will be for everyone, I personally found it to be an interesting read. through a series of hilarious, wry and impressively inquisitive anecdotes, this unflinchingly honest memoir tells the story of two crucial eras in harriet's life so far, both of which are engulfed by social media and the intense parasocial relationships it incites. obsessed with this book!! it perfectly encapsulates what it's like to grow up online and be caught in the lifelong search for connection while capturing the changing culture and social media of the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Harriet Gibsone manages to write about all the embarrassing and cringeworthy stuff we do and think and the reasons behind them—the things we seldom admit to anyone else, the things that no teen coming-of-age comedy has ever explored with half as much cringe, humour, and honesty as Gibsone. there's something so special and specific about her writing, the way she blends humour and relatability, while displaying a generous amount of vulnerability, is a skill so impressive that it floored me. Cheeks pink with a post-orgasmic flush, her hair damp and tangled, the woman in the small square photograph is surrendering to an expression of total euphoria. In her arms is a tiny creature, so new and unformed it is still practically an internal organ turned external. It’s a special baby. A healthy, happy baby. It’s Deliciously Ella’s baby.

Is This OK? is a memoir, full of finely told stories that were once secrets existing only in the writer’s mind; addictions, obsessions, weirdnesses. Gibsone came of age at the same time as the internet, her own development shaped by its strange currents. She chooses episodes from her life and makes some of them funny – laugh-out-loud-on-the-train funny; some of them are frightening and sad. Many illuminate a bigger truth about living at this peculiar time and in the grey area between the online and offline worlds. That is, of course, where many of us spend hours each day, without fully realising it, even as researchers warn us of the negative impact on self-esteem and mental health. I scrutinised every image of Alexa Chung uploaded to the internet. I followed her progress like a music fan would their favourite band; each new photo a new song, a new season, the mood of the moment. She gives a little but never enough: I wanted to know if she drinks cow’s milk. What form of contraceptive she uses. How her endometriosis has affected her life and if she has a good relationship with her mother. If she considers the success of modern influencers shallow, and if she’s ever considered Botox. Imagining me and Chris Martin schmoozing side by side at celebrity shindigs has dragged me through the drabbest days

This liberation from my online fixation would be emancipating were it not for the algorithms offering me a string of other Parisian-themed babes to dodge during my mid-morning social media slump. The other issue is that I transferred all my obsession for her on to her ex, Alex Turner, and his new partners. I’m a bit unsure on my thoughts for this one. I did enjoy reading it, and despite being that bit younger, I found it quite relatable in a way that I think most people, in their thirties and under, will - we’re so very easily drawn in to our phones, and we so easily make assumptions on other people based on what they have posted online. However the author tends to take that to the extreme, feverishly looking over partners ex-girlfriends digital footprints, hyperfixating on a fellow commuter (while struggling with personal issues), developing para-social relationships with influencers, and hearing Alexa Chung as the disparaging voice in her head. Honestly, I'm really struggling to work out whether I enjoyed this book or not. Is This Ok? is an autobiographical look at the life of Harriet Gisbone, a music journalist. The book follows her over a number of years and looks at how her use of the internet changes over time.