I’ve watched so many hours of video, maybe you have too, and I’ve seen people on the internet rise and fall, disappear. I’ve wondered about them after, millions of us have. I’ve even uploaded a few videos myself, but when two comments came through about my glasses, I took it as a turning point. Either I was going to tell them my prescription and shoot a video where I took my glasses on and off, like they’d requested, or I was going to private my videos and go back to the known world, a world where I felt like I could see the people who could see me.
In my debut novel, Plum, J heads to the internet to escape. She wants out of her parents’ house, a violent and dangerous place, but at her age, she can’t just leave through the front door. So, she sets up a cam, turns it on. Unlike me, she doesn’t leave. She stays. She clacks her long, pink nails against her cup in her childhood bedroom and receives hearts. She does this for a long time. She cams as a way to know she exists, is a person with a future: “They call you J. You are J. And you are also your full name of three full words. You are your family’s daughter and you are this girl on the internet and you are tired of figuring out who to be when.” The internet offers J a place where she can be someone new, someone safe, someone someone listens to.
Here are eight books about girls growing up on the internet — and the fallout of all that screen time.
Liveblog by Megan Boyle
For six months, Megan Boyle attempted to capture her entire consciousness on her blog, “liveblogging everything I do, feel, think, and say, to the best of my ability.” Arranged chronologically, sometimes with capitalization, other times without because she was writing on her phone, Liveblog is more than 700 pages of Boyle’s singular brain. By documenting, Boyle hoped she could feel a little less of the “uncontrollable sensation of my life not belonging to me or something. like it’s just this event i don’t seem to be participating in much, and so could be attending by mistake. maybe i wasn’t invited. clerical error.” — a feeling I’ve had before, have also attempted to remedy by self-imposed constraints and external oversight. This book feels like holding the printed internet and realizing it’s so heavy, every human feeling, thinking, doing this much all the time. The opening disclaims “**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING**” but that’s just not true at all. It’s a feat and a thrill all its own.
Good Women by Halle Hill
Halle Hill’s collection of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South is perfectly observed, detailed, and sharp, the internet intruding into life and molding it, the way it does — an Apple Watch buzzing bills due mid-funeral, a girl knowing her dad’s health is in decline because her parents aren’t telling her to get off the computer, characters take it as a sign when “cache cookies tracking their 1 a.m. Googles: ‘how to start over’ or ‘how to go back to school with a 1.9 gpa’” turn them into leads for the admissions officer at a not accredited, for-profit, completely a scam college who they gratefully thank, “You’re a good woman.”
I think I’ll forever be able to transport myself to the bus in “Seeking Arrangements.” Krystall is on a 22-hour Greyhound bus trip with an older man (and his baggie of prescription medications she’s minding) who she met on an app, as she avoids texts from her sister (and voice of reason). The old dude’s made big claims that he “created MySpace before MySpace” even though a Google search comes up blank about that, and he likes to chat on Yahoo! email. At the rest stop, I want Krystall to run, but she eats with him in the restaurant, orders and drinks Long Island Ice Teas, and gets back on the bus. Reading, I can smell the bus, almost feel car sick, fantasizing along with Krystall about any and all escape routes.
The New Me by Halle Butler
A temp job, disaffection, Chicago. After a day temping, tights sagging, Millie goes home and opens her laptop to comfort herself, watches serialized murder documentaries — “Someone is in the house! I wish.” Watching TV on the laptop, even though she doesn’t like TV, even though she wants to be the kind of person who listens to music as she cooks after work.
As Millie’s self destruction compounds, her life frays more and more, and she pulls on the fraying strings: “As an exercise, to show myself what it will be like to have more money, I go to the Whole Foods and spend $60 on things that will not last long.” It’s a dizzying, addictive, pleasingly tiring announcement of the false promise of self reinvention.
Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom
“I am on my phone, of course I am.” In Aesthetica, Rowbottom alternates viewpoints between a mid-thirties former Instagram celebrity and her teenage self, the nineteen-year-old with a dream to use her youth to garner power, a power that lasts. Mid-thirties Anna wants to reverse her plastic surgeries, is living in the fallout of the fame, but her nineteen-year-old self so badly wants to get that power, to go through with her plan to be different from her mom, single and love-addicted, to prove her dad who left that he left something meaningful. The 2017 setting is so specific to that exact moment in the internet after we’d transformed from sepia-toned landscapes and food plates to a texture-removed, texture re-added glow of faces, bodies, and influence. How much of it can be undone? Rowbottom explores this question so expertly and so juicily.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
In the first part of Patricia Lockwood’s novel, No One Is Talking About This, the famous-on-the-internet and very online protagonist travels the world, invited as a panelist to speak, types into the portal, posts: “Are we in hell?” “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?” It buzzes. Then she gets two texts: “Something has gone wrong, and How soon can you get here?” and the protagonist is pulled back into the real world (“Oh, she thought hazily, falling rain-wise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time?”) and the immediacy of a hospital’s NICU. What does the internet give her there? A tool for transcending physicality, connecting, coping, a reminder that the world has both an endless scroll and beating organs, is both glowing from behind and here skin to skin, full of devastation and connection.
Internet Crusader by George Wylesol
George Wylesol’s Internet Crusader so faithfully illustrates the late 90s, early 2000s internet, it almost emanates modem sounds. The graphic novel’s protagonist is a 12-year-old boy using AOL Instant Messenger to talk to his friends Nate and Katie before the parental controls shut down his internet session for the day — they share links, get into trouble, get grounded, save the day. Wylesol designed the pages and type in Illustrator, then inkjet printed them, then scanned them again to adjust the contrast, the digital-analog-digital process so convincingly mimicking those deep CPU screens and the very specific buzz of seeing a friend’s screen names ungrey as they came online, typing and being typed to.
Luster by Raven Leilani
Edie’s got an ill-fitting job at a publishing company but she’s really a painter, though she won’t call herself that. She’s dating (online, of course). When she hits it off with Eric, they meet up at an amusement park. The younger Brooklynite is swayed to come to Eric’s cushy house in New Jersey, where the desperations (financial and otherwise) are of a different flavor. When he ghosts her, Edie breaks the rules of his open marriage and it all unspools from there. His wife’s an autopsist, there’s a visit to the morgue, a costumed trip to a comic con, a supremely uncomfortable anniversary party and so, so many bad decisions. It had me hooked.
The Infinite Wait by Julia Wertz
In The Infinite Wait, Julia Wertz’s autobiographical collection of comic short stories, chronicles her non-comics jobs, her first uploads, her official employment as a comics artist, her early 2000s ride through “comics are the next big thing at the big publishers.” The most evocative sections are the panels of Wertz at the desk with the computer, hunch-shouldered, her inner thoughts on full display. So much of growing up on the internet was getting information from the computer when I was alone — and the flattening of the lines between the inner and outer worlds. The Infinite Wait so perfectly captures what it feels like when there’s a portal to the outside world right there on the desk, offering its glow.
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