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

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You can have my eggs,” she responds, as if at a breakfast buffet. And so begins a dual journey: my quest to get pregnant, and my battle against the demon hormones. 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. I get it, and I definitely related to her struggle, as I am also a massive overthinker, but reading an entire book of someone else putting themself through this repeatedly made me feel small, tired, embarrassed and depressed. On the plus side, it also made me resolve to work on my own issues and ease off on the overthinking (thankfully I am not also a cyber-stalker!), so that is a positive outcome from the read! Throughout a fifteen-year career in journalism, Harriet Gibsone has worked as a prominent writer and editor at a range of titles. Former Deputy Editor of the Guardian Guide, she has written for G2, The Sunday Times Culture, Time Out, Nylon and 125 Magazine, and has provided a comedic voice to huge brands such as Bumble. In 2020 she co-created and co-wrote the acclaimed BBC Three comedy short BEHIND THE FILTER with Ted Lasso writer Phoebe Walsh.

In 1972, the Apollo 17 mission took a photograph from space that changed the perception of how people saw the Earth. The picture became known as “The Blue Marble” because it showed not a green planet but a blue one. Every land mass is surrounded by a single interconnected ocean that acts, says the physicist Helen Czerski, as “a gigantic engine, a dynamic liquid powerhouse” that “takes sunlight and converts it into giant underwater currents and waterfalls, hauling around the ingredients for life”. 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, Guardian Music Journalist, self-professed creep and former winner of the coveted ‘Fittest Girl in Year 11’ award, Harriet Gibsone lives in fear of her internet searches being leaked. 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 Music journalist, self-professed creep and former winner of the coveted ‘Fittest Girl in Year 11’ award, Harriet Gibsone lives in fear of her internet searches being leaked.Until a diagnosis of early onset menopause in her late twenties, 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). 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. Being a similar age to Harriet, I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the references to things such as My Space but otherwise I found this quite tough going. It's a slightly unusual premise for an autobiography as Harriet isn't a celebrity, nor has she lived through a major event which is why most people would read this kind of book. A year of medical tests, desperate anticipation, thousands of pounds of IVF drugs and a sister pumped full of insane hormones. We are all broken; Mark and I spend the day walking around our local park, avoiding buggies.

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. She was in her early 30s when she experienced a host of alarming and mysterious symptoms: sweating, bloating, emotional instability and brain fog, leading to a diagnosis of premature ovarian insufficiency, one cause of early menopause. She struggles hard to get pregnant via a donor, and to give birth, and her account of both is quite stunning. The misogynistic resistance to women writing frankly about birth and motherhood means that such work is still too rare. The power and horror of bearing children have been covered with skill and clarity by writers such as Rachel Cusk in A Life’s Work and Anne Enright in Making Babies. Gibsone owns her place among them with a bloodied confidence after the fight it took to get there. Anushka also speaks to Dr Lynne Robinson, a gynaecologist at Birmingham women’s hospital and council member of the British Menopause Society, about why menopause is belittled as an insignificant problem – and what can be done to improve diagnosis for younger women. 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 Something has awakened in me, the emergence of a surlier version of myself, someone more weary in the face of such temptations. This is the voice of my longsuffering, baseline soul, and it is assuring me of some facts.Honestly, I nearly gave up at the beginning as, whilst the writing was good, the 'story' was pretty non-existent and I found myself wondering why on earth I was reading about someone's fairly uneventful life. I did enjoy it more towards the end and found myself really empathising with Harriet as she grew her family. Hilarious and cringe-inducingly nostalgic . . . It's a cliche to say You'll laugh, you'll cry, but with this book, you really will * New Statesman * 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. despite being the former title holder of 'fittest girl in year 11' (huge slay), harriet is as insecure as the rest of us. throughout her journey into womanhood, she is increasingly drawn to comparing her appearance, behaviour and life with that of people she stalks online, be it alexa chung, her ex boyfriend's ex, her therapist's girlfriend, or mumfluencers with dreamy birth stories and notoriously unattainable daily routines.

This is a very brave book to have written. Like an alcoholic writing of their worst indulgences or a drug user telling us about their most shameful lows, she tells us about her obsessive behaviour and online stalking of partners and people she fancied. I can imagine there are a few dozen people who will feel very uncomfortable when they find out how much time she was spending bouncing around the internet trying to find out everything about them.

Featured Reviews

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. Most of the rest of the book is Gibsone writing about her bland life with not much more about parasocial relationships. There are some parts about Myspace stalking and whatnot but nothing outside the ordinary for anyone that lived through that era. The book does go off the rails a bit with a deranged dirty disabled toilet fantasy about equally bland Chris Martin but it's not as amusing as the author probably thinks it is.