Is This OK? by Harriet Gibsone review – warped intimacy and mixed blessings
As a child, Harriet Gibsone would spend hours sitting with a friend on the roof of a rotting wooden playhouse, staring into the front room of an elderly couple who lived over the fence. This illicit hobby was an oddly mesmerising exercise in anthropology. It was also an early manifestation of what she dubs her “inherent lurk-mode compulsion”, an urge that morphs into a full-blown addiction in adulthood, thanks to the internet and its opportunities for snooping.
Her eye-wateringly honest and all-too-relatable memoir takes its title from the question she is eventually forced to ask herself. Is it all right to be obsessively deep-diving into the online profiles of professional rivals, long-ago exes, your therapist’s ex’s new boyfriend?
MSN Messenger facilitates alarmingly intense first love at 15, an online forum leads to a sad Reading festival hook-up
By this point, she has become a successful music journalist. Her journey there makes for a nostalgic trip back to the 00s, when she moves to London and hurtles round a newly hip Hackney to an indie soundtrack. The rapidly evolving internet is there for her every step of the way.
Self-deprecating humour dominates as she describes the decidedly mixed blessings this new technology brings to her life. For instance, MSN Messenger facilitates alarmingly intense first love at 15, an online forum leads to a sad Reading festival hook-up, and TikTok will later inspire an ill-advised mullet.
Is This OK? grows more serious in its later chapters. As a 31-year-old newlywed, Gibsone was diagnosed with premature menopause. Thanks to a donor egg and IVF, she is finally able to conceive and her son arrives via a traumatic delivery shortly before the pandemic hits.
Her lockdown insecurities are magnified by Instagram’s “momfluencers” and the messageboards on which they’re trolled. Compulsively drawn to the warped intimacy of “parasocial” relationships, she realises she has a problem.
Gibsone’s instinct is to shy away from the language of mental health. This ages her just as decisively as her ability to recall the din of a dial-up modem, but it does something else too. It enables her to temper her book’s lightly worn wisdom with the very quality that algorithms fail to promote: nuance.
• Is This OK? One Woman’s Search for Connection Online by Harriet Gibsone is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
