and the second: her late twenties, as she falls in love, receives a devastating diagnosis of early onset menopause, experiences a traumatic birth following years of invasive medical treatments, and learns to navigate motherhood. Throughout a fifteen-year career in journalism, Harriet Gibsone has worked as a prominent writer and editor at a range of titles. Former Deputy Editor of the Guardian Guide, she has written for G2, The Sunday Times Culture, Time Out, Nylon and 125 Magazine, and has provided a comedic voice to huge brands such as Bumble. In 2020 she co-created and co-wrote the acclaimed BBC Three comedy short BEHIND THE FILTER with Ted Lasso writer Phoebe Walsh. Until a diagnosis of early onset menopause in her late twenties, Harriet spent much of her young life feeding neuroses and insecurities with obsessive internet searching (including compulsive googling of exes, prospective partners, and their exes), and indulging in whirlwind ‘parasocial relationships’ (translation: one-sided affairs with celebrities she has never met). She writes her story in such an open way and with such a comic, albeit self-deprecating voice, that I found this book next to impossible to put down, I guess it was that window into someone else’s life that she herself finds so addictive. But it is not just her writing style and her voice that is so compelling, it is the brave honesty and the raw edge-ness that is piled into this book that makes it fascinating. In this book, Czerski looks at both the physical properties of the ocean and the way they have influenced animal and human life. In lucid chapters she discusses such phenomena as the water walls and strata that sit deep beneath the surface, how different regions of ocean breathe carbon dioxide in and out; a marine ecosystem that is based on organisms so small 61 per cent are invisible to the human eye; and the societies – from Iceland to Polynesia – that have found different ways to live with and from the seas. This engine, she shows, is extraordinarily complex and we don’t understand exactly how it works.

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 * This liberation from my online fixation would be emancipating were it not for the algorithms offering me a string of other Parisian-themed babes to dodge during my mid-morning social media slump. The other issue is that I transferred all my obsession for her on to her ex, Alex Turner, and his new partners. Eventually my preoccupations with other people’s lives would expand to include those with a public profile, too – people on TV, in films, musicians and, in later years, influencers. I’d come to discover this has a name: parasocial relationships, the dynamic where a “normal” person feels strongly towards a famous person. The term originated in 1956 to refer to the relationship between viewers and television personalities, and has become more widespread over the past decade due to fanatical “Stan” culture and the superficial notion that we have 24-hour access to the lives of public figures via social media and reality shows. 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.

Advance Praise

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. 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. I've seldom seen such extreme soul-bearing and admission of dysfunctional behaviour. It's a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash. 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."

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. Nine decades after JB Priestley’s English Journey presented his influential sketches of life beyond London, Stuart Maconie has retrodden the route for a 2020s update. Swapping Priestley’s chauffeured Daimler for trains and buses, and boiled-beef dinners for prawn puris, Maconie maps progress via topographies of vibrancy and decline. Like his hero, he leaves nothing un-flâneured, reporting on food and fashions, potholes and pub-life, and the bearing of folk as he finds them. Paul Martinovic, associate editor, acquired world rights from Ruth Cairns at Featherstone Cairns. Is This OK? will be published in 2023. obsessed with this book!! it perfectly encapsulates what it's like to grow up online and be caught in the lifelong search for connection while capturing the changing culture and social media of the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Harriet Gibsone manages to write about all the embarrassing and cringeworthy stuff we do and think and the reasons behind them—the things we seldom admit to anyone else, the things that no teen coming-of-age comedy has ever explored with half as much cringe, humour, and honesty as Gibsone. there's something so special and specific about her writing, the way she blends humour and relatability, while displaying a generous amount of vulnerable, is a skill so impressive that it floored me. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshopsThe latter half of the book takes a turn, with talk of chronic illness, infertility, having a newborn, and dealing with a traumatic birth, just as the pandemic sinks its teeth into the world. I really felt for the author during these chapters, and I hope that she’s in a better place now. Then, at 31, she started to experience symptoms she couldn’t make sense of: forgetfulness, mysterious mood swings and bouts of weeping, and being woken in the night by sudden hot flushes. The sudden bursts of aggression made her feel like Piers Morgan. Her world was crumbling – but nobody could tell her exactly what was wrong. Persistently funny, ill-advisedly honest and deadly accurate . . . My mind is blown -- Caitlin Moran, author of More Than a Woman 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).

Harriet the Spy is a 1964 childrens’ book about a little girl who snoops relentlessly on her neighbours. Harriet Gibsone did the same thing when she was young. Now in her late 30s, she still shares with the fictional Harriet a powerful imagination and endless fascination with others. Harriet the Spy was banned in a number of American schools; apparently morally upright people didn’t approve of watchful girls trying to figure out the world on their own terms. I love these characters, nurturing as they do some feeling of control in a world where they do not have any. given that morally ambiguous weird girl behaviour, '00s social media, online micro-communities and the blurred lines between url and irl are literally my favourite things to read about, i'm probably part of the exact audience gibsone set out to target with this book. i found her writing style funny and endearing, so didn't mind the few tangents that did little for plot progression. her deep dive into deliciously ella's pregnancy/birth/mum journey compared to hers is my fave part of the book. highly recommend! As life has evolved, there has been a constant stream of objects of lust and intrigue, each of which has warped my interior world during a crisis. Take puppy-dog stadium pop-god Chris Martin. The Coldplay frontman has enjoyed a 20-year residency in the front of my brain. Imagined scenarios of us together on Christmas Day or schmoozing side by side at a celebrity shindig have dragged me through the drabbest afternoons. Picador has landed Is This OK? Becoming a Woman on the Internet, a memoir of contemporary womanhood from Harriet Gibsone.

Featured Reviews

There are members of the network in their teens, some with no symptoms, and others who have been diagnosed much later, living with the destabilising symptoms for most of their adult lives. I attend a couple of group sessions at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital – there are doctors there who do Q&As about fertility and hormones. Those women are there – the ones who demand answers – and boy, do they get results. I just want to ask everyone if they are OK. In one of the meetings about POI’s emotional toll, we are all given a leaf to hold. I’m not quite sure why, but it’s nice, and for a few moments we sit in silence and feel connected by our grief. Social media is a hellscape: I mute friends who have got pregnant by accident. I avoid seeing people who have children She says that it’s natural to feel jealous and obsessive, when so much of being a woman is mandatory social voyeurism, where you are forced to absorb a revolving billboard of other tantalising lifestyles pioneered by better girls that could be you if you work hard enough, collect all the right tokens and stop eating crisps. Most of the rest of the book is Gibsone writing about her bland life with not much more about parasocial relationships. There are some parts about Myspace stalking and whatnot but nothing outside the ordinary for anyone that lived through that era. The book does go off the rails a bit with a deranged dirty disabled toilet fantasy about equally bland Chris Martin but it's not as amusing as the author probably thinks it is. 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.

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. It appears that Harriet Gibsone has spent her entire life trying to turn herself into the various people she obsessively follows online, from fellow-journalist colleagues like ‘Laura’ to celebrities like Alexa Chung. It made me feel really sad, because Harriet – as presented through her own words – seems perfectly lovely and lovable if she could only set aside those obsessive thoughts. In 2017, Harriet Gibsone was a music journalist for the Guardian – working hard, going out lots, and just married. She was ready for her 30s, but not quite ready for a family.through a series of hilarious, wry and impressively inquisitive anecdotes, this unflinchingly honest memoir tells the story of two crucial eras in harriet's life so far, both of which are engulfed by social media and the intense parasocial relationships it incites. 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.”