Book No. 19 of 2021
This book is absolutely dripping with specificity—I was internally howling at how accurately Lockwood captures the absurdity and neuroticism of Twitter culture, describing actual online incidents, memes, and gifs with a dry objectivity that renders them ridiculous. Also, as someone who got internet famous for one (1) very specific Twitter joke, and subsequently accomplished things IRL thanks to said joke fame, I related deeply to the narrator, to whom these exact same things happen. I realize this is not a universally relatable experience.
Also felt really seen by the extremely accurate descriptions of the way you’re made to feel in a subculture of performative goodness, with all the guilt and shame that comes with never knowing or caring enough, or correctly, for the hive mind in the “portal.”
The second half of the book is seriously next level—Lockwood as the narrator shifts her focus to a private tragedy and shows not only the pain and everyday highs and lows of an all-consuming real life crisis, but the degree of surreal incongruity between real life and “portal” life. The two halves of the book seem like they shouldn’t go together, but they absolutely do, and in a way that holds an unflinching mirror up not only to internet culture, but to society at large (and to the fact that political rhetoric and policy so often does not reflect the actual needs of the people it purports to serve). Along with this shift, the title of the book morphs from a parody of online hysteria into the expression of personal grief.
Similar Reads
I do recommend pairing this with Lockwood’s nonfiction memoir Priestdaddy.
I was indelibly reminded multiple times of Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet.
The structure of the book reminded me of other stories that utilize framework shifts: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble, and Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.
The humorous effect of not using names to describe obvious people/things reminded me of Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley.