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<\/a><\/p>\nIn my debut novel, Plum<\/a>, J heads to the internet to escape. She wants out of her parents\u2019 house, a violent and dangerous place, but at her age, she can\u2019t just leave through the front door. So, she sets up a cam, turns it on. Unlike me, she doesn\u2019t 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: \u201cThey call you J. You are J. And you are also your full name of three full words. You are your family\u2019s daughter and you are this girl on the internet and you are tired of figuring out who to be when.\u201d The internet offers J a place where she can be someone new, someone safe, someone someone listens to.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here are eight books about girls growing up on the internet \u2014 and the fallout of all that screen time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Liveblog<\/a> by Megan Boyle<\/p>\n For six months, Megan Boyle attempted to capture her entire consciousness on her blog, \u201cliveblogging everything I do, feel, think, and say, to the best of my ability.\u201d Arranged chronologically, sometimes with capitalization, other times without because she was writing on her phone, Liveblog is more than 700 pages of Boyle\u2019s singular brain. By documenting, Boyle hoped she could feel a little less of the \u201cuncontrollable sensation of my life not belonging to me or something. like it\u2019s just this event i don\u2019t seem to be participating in much, and so could be attending by mistake. maybe i wasn\u2019t invited. clerical error.\u201d \u2014\u00a0a feeling I\u2019ve 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\u2019s so heavy, every human feeling, thinking, doing this much all the time. The opening disclaims \u201c**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING**\u201d but that\u2019s just not true at all. It\u2019s a feat and a thrill all its own.<\/p>\n Good Women<\/a> by\u00a0Halle Hill<\/p>\n Halle Hill\u2019s 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 \u2014 an Apple Watch buzzing bills due mid-funeral, a girl knowing her dad\u2019s health is in decline because her parents aren\u2019t telling her to get off the computer, characters take it as a sign when \u201ccache cookies tracking their 1 a.m. Googles: \u2018how to start over\u2019 or \u2018how to go back to school with a 1.9 gpa\u2019\u201d turn them into leads for the admissions officer at a not accredited, for-profit, completely a scam college who they gratefully thank, \u201cYou\u2019re a good woman.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I think I\u2019ll forever be able to transport myself to the bus in \u201cSeeking Arrangements.\u201d Krystall is on a 22-hour Greyhound bus trip with an older man (and his baggie of prescription medications she\u2019s minding) who she met on an app, as she avoids texts from her sister (and voice of reason). The old dude\u2019s made big claims that he \u201ccreated MySpace before MySpace\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The New Me<\/a> by Halle Butler<\/p>\n 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 \u2014\u00a0\u201cSomeone is in the house! I wish.\u201d Watching TV on the laptop, even though she doesn\u2019t like TV, even though she wants to be the kind of person who listens to music as she cooks after work.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Millie\u2019s self destruction compounds, her life frays more and more, and she pulls on the fraying strings: \u201cAs 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.\u201d It\u2019s a dizzying, addictive, pleasingly tiring announcement of the false promise of self reinvention.\u00a0<\/p>\n Aesthetica <\/a>by Allie Rowbottom<\/p>\n \u201cI am on my phone, of course I am.\u201d 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\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n No One Is Talking About This<\/a> by Patricia Lockwood<\/p>\n In the first part of Patricia Lockwood\u2019s 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: \u201cAre we in hell?\u201d \u201cAre we all just going to keep doing this until we die?\u201d It buzzes. Then she gets two texts: \u201cSomething has gone wrong, and How soon can you get here?\u201d and the protagonist is pulled back into the real world (\u201cOh, 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?\u201d) and the immediacy of a hospital\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Internet Crusader<\/a> by George Wylesol<\/p>\n George Wylesol\u2019s Internet Crusader so faithfully illustrates the late 90s, early 2000s internet, it almost emanates modem sounds. The graphic novel\u2019s 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 \u2014 they share links, get into trouble, get grounded, save the day. Wylesol designed the pages<\/a> 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\u2019s screen names ungrey as they came online, typing and being typed to.<\/p>\n Luster<\/a> by Raven Leilani<\/p>\n Edie\u2019s got an ill-fitting job at a publishing company but she\u2019s really a painter, though she won\u2019t call herself that. She\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s an autopsist, there\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n In The Infinite Wait, Julia Wertz\u2019s 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 \u201ccomics are the next big thing at the big publishers.\u201d 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 \u2014\u00a0and the flattening of the lines between the inner and outer worlds. The Infinite Wait so perfectly captures what it feels like when there\u2019s a portal to the outside world right there on the desk, offering its glow.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tTake a break from the news<\/p>\n We publish your favorite authors\u2014even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tYOUR INBOX IS LIT<\/p>\n Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve watched so many hours of video, maybe you have too, and I\u2019ve seen people on the internet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3161],"tags":[10213,3082,224,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-14729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-feminism","9":"tag-internet","10":"tag-relationships","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114327041122086925","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/9780987963024-216x300-1.jpeg\")
<\/a>The Infinite Wait<\/a> by Julia Wertz<\/p>\n