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

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Picador has landed Is This OK? Becoming a Woman on the Internet, a memoir of contemporary womanhood from Harriet Gibsone. 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 * I scrutinised every image of Alexa Chung uploaded to the internet. I followed her progress like a music fan would their favourite band; each new photo a new song, a new season, the mood of the moment. She gives a little but never enough: I wanted to know if she drinks cow’s milk. What form of contraceptive she uses. How her endometriosis has affected her life and if she has a good relationship with her mother. If she considers the success of modern influencers shallow, and if she’s ever considered Botox. Imagining me and Chris Martin schmoozing side by side at celebrity shindigs has dragged me through the drabbest days

I visit the doctor and tell him about the sudden short-lived sadness now seeping into hours and days, as if someone has murdered my soul, or something to that effect. “Would you consider antidepressants?” he asks. I loved this book because it is SO relatable. Harriet is only a few years older than me, so I felt like I had a very similar experience of the world and pop culture growing up – the nostalgia really hit me reading this! But what really captivated me was Harriet’s unfiltered honesty and authenticity, as she fearlessly shared the highs and lows that many women can relate to.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 Is This OK? is an honest but very funny memoir by music journalist Harriet Gibson, about growing up as the internet becomes a bigger part of people’s lives. This is on top of the usual teenage anxieties and some very unexpected, devastating health issues which completely blindsided her. Suddenly, with a diagnosis of early menopause in her late twenties, her relationship with the internet takes a darker turn, as her online addictions are thrown into sharp relief by the corporeal realities of illness and motherhood. as a writer myself, I found myself relating so heavily to Harriet's experiences with people she obsesses over online and thinks are too amazing and beautiful and talented to ever live up to. she's constantly acutely aware of her own feelings of imposter syndrome, feeling too basic, untalented, and stupid... always comparing herself to those around her who seem to be able to have original ideas and know how to pull the right words from their brain al Two months go by. I can’t sit on this decision for too long. Anyone who’s ever done fertility treatment knows the waiting around is one of the worst bits. To have self-imposed limbo is foolish. It helps that Mark has remarkable clarity. We either want a baby, or we don’t. And we do, so we decide to put our absolute faith in the professionals and do whatever Sabatini tells us. Because of my condition, I don’t qualify for any free rounds of IVF, so we decide we’ll see him privately in London, and get the donor from a clinic in Madrid. It’ll be fast and they have an excellent success rate.

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. the first: her early twenties, as she juggles her young career as a music journalist with incessantly stalking pretty much everyone who enters her orbit online.

This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.

Sadly, as the book continued into her adult life, I started to feel less connected and more worried about her. Her addiction to the internet and cyberstalking celebrities or any random person she meets (seriously, no one is safe) became less funny and relatable, and instead more deranged and a bit unhinged. She comes across as proud of her cyber sleuthing and she is so keen to bare everything in her book, I’m surprised no one took her hand and told her that maybe this isn’t something the whole world needs to know. I was 19 and in the market for a new idol when I first saw her bounce on screen with Popworld co-star Alex Zane in the mid-00s. Within months her reign as one of the last true “It” girls had begun – a force of style and personality that would later catapult her to America, launch her clothing brand and create the type of hype and mystique normally preserved by pop stars, or a natural deodorant that actually works. 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, GuardianThere is melancholy, too, in the gaps between how people feel and how they act. Seamus’s interior critiques of contemporary poetry are perceptive, but in seminars he is petulant. Fyodor, one of the non-students, has beautiful thoughts but doesn’t know how to express them and lapses into silence. Fatima has to work to support herself, which alienates her fellow dancers, more or less oblivious to their privilege, and she never really manages to make her friends understand. Despite the characters’ frequent self-absorption, the novel’s mood is one of tenderness and yearning.

As I haemorrhage everywhere, I am handed my son for what feels like 20 minutes. I have a bad internal tear. The first set of stitches goes wrong, and the doctors wheel me into theatre, leaving Mark in a room filled with my blood and the overwhelming presence of our tiny naked son. 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. Is This OK? is a memoir, full of finely told stories that were once secrets existing only in the writer’s mind; addictions, obsessions, weirdnesses. Gibsone came of age at the same time as the internet, her own development shaped by its strange currents. She chooses episodes from her life and makes some of them funny – laugh-out-loud-on-the-train funny; some of them are frightening and sad. Many illuminate a bigger truth about living at this peculiar time and in the grey area between the online and offline worlds. That is, of course, where many of us spend hours each day, without fully realising it, even as researchers warn us of the negative impact on self-esteem and mental health.

Featured Reviews

As I sit in the waiting room, the garish pinks and blues of Loose Women punching their way out of the tiny TV, I imagine how awful it would be if I was actually fine. All the moaning and sketchy behaviour for nothing. Or maybe it’s more serious than the menopause. Could there be something fatally wrong with me? A classy funeral, maybe in Edinburgh. Intimate, but a few famous faces come along to pay their respects. Will Mark ever find love again? A doctor calls my name. I'm glad I don't know her - or perhaps I'm more glad I was never the ex-girlfriend of somebody she was obsessed with - but I found the book to be oddly endearing, the deeper I got into it.