An audio book - memoir - with front cover puffs from Sara Pascoe, Caitlin Moran and Bob Mortimer.
The first-person persona, Harriet, grows up in Saffron Walden, born in the mid-eighties. The internet becomes part of her life. She uses dial-up at first, then msm, then forums. She learns the tricks of each, faking her age etc. Music criticism is her main interest with Melody Maker her ambition. At 14 she has a slightly unstable 17 y.o. boyfriend with whom she has sex for the first time. At 17 she has a 25 y.o. boyfriend who she first meets online as an admired poster on an Indie music forum. At 17 she wins the year's prettiest girl prize at school. She advances to MySpace. A significant moment in relationships is when personal e-mail addresses are exchanged. She spends days at school then goes home and chats online to schoolmates about the day. At 18 she doesn't think she's shy, but her mother does, and Harriet later thinks that her mother's always right. She goes to Bournemouth University, meets Lewis. She learns how to do "ironic pouts". She fails her first year at university.
She works in London as a music journalist on The Fly (a free paper) for years before joining the Guardian. Lots of parties and meeting celebs. She compares herself with others. She checks people's online presence before meeting them. She checks their (ex) partners too. She continues to check people online years after she's split with them (an ex dies young of a brain tumour). She imagines what meetings/sex with people will be like before meeting them. She fancies Chris Martin (Coldplay) for 20 years. There's an extended fantasy about him in which Harriet's huband dies and she lives with Chris, meeting his ex Gwyneth.
A blog phase. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
She has chances to break into BBC work. Doesn't go well. She starts living with fellow Guardian worker Mark days after dating him. In her early thirties she finds she has "early menopause" and though children haven't been mentioned, they now want children. They try with her sister's eggs, then a donor's. Finally she succeeds. She still uses the web seriously, following Mumfluencers and checking the online life of people she meets (trainers, therapists, even random people at bus-stops - and their partners). The birth is traumatic, both for mother and child. But she chooses not to report her experiences on the web.
The online algorithms misunderstand her - she looks up pregnancy problems and gets stories about happy families. She reads that the internet has shortened childhood - kids are exposed to the adult world earlier nowadays.
She tries not to web-binge. She notices that some of her friends no longer post online - because they're happy? because they're sad? They no longer pretend to be what they're not. She's too old for TikTok.
Motherhood means that she struggles to get out of the house after 8pm. She feels isolated. She avoids Mark. She suffers from bouts of dissociation, and wonders why her family and friends aren't enough. She sees her father's selfie on Facebook - he's had a near-fatal heart attack and wants to re-assure people he's ok.
Because of the pandemic everyone's online. She joins a Zoom session of 70 mums.
After the book, there's an interview. Only then do we learn that her father was obsessed with music and she continues his habit of creating playlists for people. I think that info would have been good for the book. She gave up music for a while. Now she plays it while with her child. She didn't much like some of the music she used to listen to in order to impress friends.
Other reviews
- Maeve Higgins (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. ... Is This OK? swings between silliness and profundity)
No comments:
Post a Comment