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

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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. 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. The book feels split into two halves - one, Hattie’s youth and escapades in the music journalism game, and two, her more recent adult life, covering the pressures of work, becoming a parent, the early menopause and other difficulties Hattie writes about with honesty and transparency. I found myself both laughing out loud at times, and feeling sad at others. It’s raw and real and human. I was left seeking some kind of additional closure, but perhaps that’s for another book in the future. 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. All her relationships, both online and IRL, are subjected to exhaustive analysis, comparison and self-conscious adjustments in her search for some imagined perfect state of being, in herself and in relation to others.

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. How about an anonymous donor?” the doctor says. “It’s not a big deal. The baby’s still yours.” Mark agrees. I nod, but it does feel like a big deal. My body has been a scientific experiment for over a year now, and I need some space. I am horrified by the thought of putting someone else’s body into my body. At 7am the next day I get a call from an unknown number. A nurse from the hospital. She has bad news. None of the eggs has fertilised. Is This OK? swings between silliness and profundity; Gibsone is a writer taking herself seriously but having fun while doing it. 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.

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. As life has evolved, there has been a constant stream of objects of lust and intrigue.’ Photograph: Kate Peters/The Guardian. Makeup and hair: Dani Richardson using RMS Beauty and Kevin Murphy. Top: Pavement I stop showering and exercising, preserving my energy for basic tasks such as “putting on the same massive grey jumper as yesterday” and for wallowing in my own disgustingness. In spite of my greasy hair and unusual temper, my husband Mark still cares about my wellbeing, and encourages me to be persistent with the GP so we can get an official diagnosis. After a year of puzzled doctors and lots of blood tests, I am summoned to an endocrinologist in a hospital in central London. 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

I've seldom seen such extreme soul-bearing and admission of dysfunctional behaviour. It's a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash. Gibsone, former deputy editor of the Guardian Guide, recounts her life as a young woman spending her time “feeding her neuroses and insecurities” with obsessive internet searching, including “compulsive” Googling of partners, their exes and becoming subsumed in “parasocial relationships”. However, her relationship with the internet changed once Gibsone was diagnosed with early onset menopause in her late twenties and when, later, she became pregnant after years of IVF, HRT and other “invasive” treatments. Maconie is entertaining on regional quirks and rivalries: Potteries people are “a mysterious, smoky lacuna between the Brummies and the Mancs” and he laments the ersatz “Panama hattery” of the Cotswolds. But he’s also on a mission to expose the absurdity of the pastoral, biscuit-tin caricatures of England dreamed up by a London-coddled middle-class media. In this, he hits his stride surveying the dejection of smaller towns in the Midlands and the north – deprived of industry and socially adrift – and celebrating the remnants of their proud working-class histories. While Maconie catches the exhausted national mood beautifully, a uniting idea of Englishness remains elusive. Maybe that’s his point.In the weeks after the test, my husband can see I am struggling. He is, too. I can’t face putting Libby through it again; it’s a lot of time and physical and emotional labour. At this stage we are introduced to Dr Luca Sabatini by Debbie. A clean, strong, pragmatic Italian man, who is a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist. My hero. 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 realities of illness and motherhood. 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've come to realize my relationship with the internet is an infidelity-a remorseless, ongoing affair with the fringes of humanity while I aμ in a stable relationship with all of my friends and relatives." And yet I took care of my son during pregnancy just as she told me to; I did gentle yoga, meditation and ate whatever my body asked for, the good and the bad. We never had the bliss or rapture of that photo and I don’t think I’ll ever catch up, especially as Ella has a nanny (shout out to Janet). It’s an experience that has been twisted and magnificent, one that has provided sweet relief and also demonstrated the clear capacity to destroy me completely. But, first, let me bring you up to speed. Gloriously unfiltered, hilariously unhinged and utterly unlike anything else you'll read this year. Harriet's incredibly moving memoir made me laugh out loud, cringe, reminiscence and think deeply. What a wonderful introduction to a truly singular comedic voice; I remain in awe! -- Yomi Adegoke 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, GuardianI’ve gained a certain fearlessness. A timidity from my girlhood has been beaten out of me’: Gibsone and her husband, Mark, with their son in May. Photograph: Russell Colman We got three eggs,” she says with a conciliatory smile, and a defeated nod. “We’ll give you a call tomorrow to let you know how the fertilisation goes, and then we should be able to do the transfer.”