It’s rare I get to read a book in one sitting, but a recent long-ish overnight flight with two small children asleep on me provided the perfect opportunity. Irish writer Catherine Prasifka’s second novel proved to be an absorbing, compelling read perfect for the occasion.

Prasifka’s first novel None of this is Serious (which I didn’t love) was a novel about being too online with a sci-fi element (a hole in the sky). This novel is also very much about a life led online but it’s a coming of age novel, written from the perspective of a young woman, entirely in the second person present tense.

Second person narratives don’t always work but Prasifka carries it off here with aplomb. It lends a chilling quality to the story and an urgency to the writing.

This is a cautionary tale really, about a generation allowed unfettered access to the internet by their well-meaning if naive parents who had no clue what was on there. I mean, we still allow children a lot of access today but we know more now than they did in the early 00s and we have better (if still inadequate) safeguards.

There a palpable sense of anxiety throughout the book, and a sadness for innocence lost too early, with seminal childhood experiences and teenage rites of passage (Irish college, first kiss, first sexual experience) compromised by the ever-present threat of it being posted online, not to mention the expectations of teenage boys raised on a diet of pornography.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this one since I finished it. An excellent read that deserves to be a big seller and will provoke further conversation around the need by all of us, young and old, to disconnect a lot more. 4.5-5/5⭐️

*This is How You Remember It will be published on 2 May. Many thanks to the author, publisher @canongatebooks and @netgalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Wow, what a brilliant book! I feel like this will resonate with you, especially if you are a Millennial/elder Gen-Z.

The main theme of this book is how unmonitored internet access shapes you as you grow up, especially when it comes to your body image and sense of self. It starts off as very innocent, with computer games that I’m pretty sure was Neopets (the nostalgia!) but was never officially named, and morphs into something more sinister. It completely changes how our unnamed main character perceives the world. You watch, and go through it, with her as she learns human experiences like shame, grief and emotional (or lack of) connection. Even things like the politics of the Internet and how disconnected that is compared to the offline world.

The writing choices were all so good. Choosing the main character to be unnamed and using second person adding a personal touch to it, like they were your thoughts and your experiences. In many ways, they were. As well as that, we didn’t know the passage of time through anything else other than through the evolution of social media and technology. Other than context clues, it was rarely obvious how old the characters were supposed to be or what year we were in. I loved that choice.

Finally, the little love story that felt like the backbone of the book was lovely to follow. Their relationship remained distant and somewhat shallow until the main character changed her relationship with social media. Once she saw it more as an addition to her life instead of something that *is* her life. only then did her relationship become something different.

An absolutely fantastic book!!

Another great book from this author! This is such a nostalgic read for anyone who grew up with the Internet and social media as a vehicle for gossip, social interaction and experimentation etc.

I enjoyed watching the character grow and experience the good and bad of life (there's hardly a topic untouched in this book). I did feel the end of the book a bit flat and unresolved, but that is bound to happen in a book like this that deals with a certain amount of time in a life; there's clearly a before and after with this book in the 'middle'. I also didn't think that the magical realism element added much to the story, though I can appreciate it as a metaphor.

Thanks: Read from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

i am blown away by this novel. the writing was so raw and sharp. so much subtext and anxiety laden into each paragraph. my own experiences were seemingly violently reflected with the honest exposition and my own thoughts horribly mirrored that of the main character. the use of the second person was cleverly done and added to the uncomfortable reading experience, which was the intention of the author.

i liked how the book tackled how the early access to internet can change a person's perception of their own self and identity. as a psychology student, i've had my fair share of research into this topic and thought this novel depicted its long term impacts and effects very explicitly. from internet personas to performance to desensitization to privacy and consent to distorted self-perceptions, the book covered most of it. the growing use of social media can play a huge role in how we see ourselves if we let ourselves be so consumed by it. in addition to this, there were also themes on sexuality, loss, innocence, shame, guilt, and grief that i felt were incorporated very well into the narrative. our sense of self and identity as well as our relationships with the people and world around us can be affected greatly by social media— how it can mediate our relationships and how our identity can be a performance online that makes the act of living itself unreal. i especially liked how taking and posting pictures can remove you from the present because you think of experiencing the moment through the lens of the past or the future (there's an exact quote from the book). i can talk all about these implications with social psychology all day so i won't go too much into this, though i must emphasize that i really liked how the author wrote this; the writing style was also such a good fit to this. i also liked how the passage of time was indicated only by the progression of social media and what was deemed trendy, what technology or social media was new, and the various attitudes towards them. i liked that we do not know how old "you" exactly are because it lends to the atmosphere of being so absorbed to social media, where access is not heavily regulated by age and they can sometimes be muddled and even disregarded in some websites. i especially liked how we move through the real world and deduce what happened to the other characters like Lorcan, his parents, the main character's parents, the grandmother, and Evan. it's so rewarding to have something come out of what was implicitly said and especially made for a great reading experience. finally, i adored the recurring subjects in her life: the beach and Lorcan. it grounds the novel and gives it a narrative arc to center the character's journey and growth. i loved that the beach and Lorcan were constant over time and that in all the lives she's lived and all the versions of herself they've witnessed, they've remained continuous. her relationship with Lorcan, as much as i do not like comparing novels to each other, feels a lot like what Normal People by Sally Rooney had, too, which i deeply enjoyed.

altogether a brilliant and striking novel. i think it is very relevant that not only serves as a cautionary tale but can also present as a point of reflection for many others. i felt so intense and involved in this, heightened only by the second person narration, and it made me look inwards and consider my relationship with social media and how it has shaped me as a person and human being. so, a very well deserved and spectacular 4-star rating!

This is a brilliant and biting take on the dangers of our online world, particularly for children. It was terrifying - not just because of how well it was written, but because of the truth it conveys about what we are doing as a society!

A coming of age story in the time of the advent of the Internet, followed by the advent of mobile phones. Porn, peer pressure and digital cameras make growing up a lot more complicated, private becomes public and hard to navigate.

A compelling story about the woes of growing up in the digital age with a science fiction twist. At times really bleak & painfully relatable & you're really drawn in with the second person narrative. At times the metaphor of the hole in the protagonist's belly was a little on the nose, but it was a clever plot device.

A definitely above average exploration of some very overdone topics in millennial fiction, including girlhood, social media, body image, pornography etc. I wasn’t particularly drawn in by the chapters covering childhood but I found that the novel really got going when the protagonist reached adolescence and beyond. I haven’t read Prasifka’s first novel but I will now seek it out.

Fascinating. I’m not sure I have ever come across a volume in the second person that is quite as hard hitting, or that is actually of quality. I think many readers who grew up in a similar era to the protagonist will find this a very thought-provoking and at times difficult to read novel - but in the best way. Inhaled this in one sitting and my mind is reeling.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for this arc !

Loved this. A perfect picture of what I think most millennials experience during their first foray into the online world

This book has the most beautiful prose, and is such a gut-wrenchingly relatable character study. I genuinely am so excited for the world to see this book it's truly incredible. As a neurodivergent woman I felt so seen and at home in this character (not sure if that's the authors intention) The constant references to feeling like you needed to perform really hit home.
loved all the commentary about social media in this book, and it's genuinely made me reflect on my life and my use of social media.
This book is girlhood in a novel. I commend this author for writing a short book that packs such a punch. It explored so many different aspects of platonic and romantic relationships in such a profound way.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this Arc

With any debut female Irish literary novelist the Sally Rooney comparison is bound to emerge; when said debut novel features Trinity Dublin student life the comparisons get stronger; when the author was (like Sally Rooney) a Trinity student themselves and more particular took part in international debating competitions the links are stronger still ……….. but in the case of Catherine Prasifka (whose debit was “None of This Is Serious”) I am tempted to say None of This Is Serious for the Rooney comparisons compared to her in fact being sister to John, Sally’s husband.

Although I did not read her debut, from reviews two things very much distinguished it from her sister-in-law’s works:

Firstly a primary focus on social media and smartphones as a primary way in which the characters navigate their lives - in Rooney’s work famously of course characters famously communicate by lengthy email but social media is all but absent;

Secondly the way it drew on the author’s Masters in Fantasy Literature – the book featuring a crack in the sky which was both present in the book and a metaphor for the experience of being in the world (in this case doomscrolling about giant problems such as climate change).

And this her second novel places social media perhaps even more centrally into the novel and has its own fantastical/metaphorical element – in this case a hole which grows over time around the navel of the protagonist and which she keeps secret from everyone else.

It is written in the second person which for me captured really well the way in which social media effectively mediates our relationship with the world – turning identity into performance – very much the theme of the novel.

The novel opens with the narrator (then aged 7) on the annual family (Mum, Dad and younger brother Evan) holiday from their Dublin home to an Irish Atlantic beach where they meet up, as every year, with a group of other family members including her father’s brother and his 9 year old son Lorcan with who she has a close bond. What distinguishes this year is that she has been allowed to use the family video camera and films a narrative of her time at the beach, rather to the bemusement of Lorcan who suggests “We can keep going … and just not record”.

But for the narrator this is the first glance of a different virtual world – more real in some ways than the real world.

The next chapter has Lorcan’s Dad visiting their house to install the first family computer – which immediately fills the narrator with wonder as she discovers the world of the internet.

From there we move forwards over the narrators life through late primary school, secondary school, a Summer Irish School Camp and ultimately college at Trinity (replete even with a debating society freshers event) – and alongside her real world passage is a much more troubled passage through the online world, which then in turn impacts on her real world which gets increasingly challenging to her – marked by the increasing growth of the hole in her stomach that she desperately hides from the world, even subconsciously holding her arms over her stomach in what becomes something of a signature gesture.

Early on she is hooked on an online virtual pet game and particularly the chat function; from there she progresses to wider chat sites; inadvertently makes an early discovery of online porn and gains early skills in erasing search histories; takes advantage of an internet-enabled iPod and wireless broadband to make her internet activity more private. And later she progresses through anonymised sexting, nude selfies, WhatsApp groups, her first kiss (and accompanying grope) captured on video and placed online, her first sexual relationship with Jack who she only later realises has an internet-influenced warped view of sexual relationships matched only by her own similarly sourced confusion, revenge porn, incels and more.

The annual beach visits and the presence of Lorcan (permanently two years ahead of her) are the few recurring items in her life. The beach “is the only thread of continuity in your life”, while Lorcan at times representing an area of solidity but more commonly over time an area of frustration as the two never quite get to a relationship while being an unspoken third party in any other relationship they have (it becomes increasingly hard not to picture the protagonist and Lorcan as Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal). This aspect becomes increasingly key over time but does give the book a necessary narrative arc and the narrator a place from which to look back on her journey (the book if anything could be interpreted as the older narrator addressing her younger self).

Overall I thought this was a striking novel dealing with an important and close to universal (at least in richer countries) topic.

Not quite sure what to make of this one, coming of age in the digital era. Perfectly fine but nothing too compelling, alas. Glad it was quite short, had quite enough.

This book is incredible. I think a lot of people will be able to relate to the subject matter, myself included. It felt very nostalgic and shows the impact the introduction of the internet had in shaping our lives. The topics in this book are heavy but they are handled really well. I loved the metaphor of the hole and I found the ending gave me the closure I needed.
Brilliant book.

This book fell into an odd place for me. On one hand I was quite taken with the first half of the book, especially the chapters that take place during the narrator's early childhood. I raced through it and found it nostalgic and weirdly cathartic to read. Especially the first chapter of this novel, which was so incredibly evocative that it left me wanting to go back to that era of my life. The use of a second person narrative here was also a great choice by the author and I doubt I would have felt so connected without it. However, as the narrator grows older (which is done through time skips that I admittedly felt were confusing and at points left me grasping to figure out how old she was) the book seems to stray away from what it was advertised as, or what I perceived it to be going into it. Yes, IN THE BEGINNING this is a book about growing up online and the good and bad of it. But it then seems to spiral into a commercial fiction novel that leans more into romance than I would have preferred, thus sort of straying away from it's original intention. Yes there are still technological repercussions that follow the narrator, but by the time she gets to college it's almost just a story of the aftermath of sexual assault. There's an odd shallowness to the book, where you feel the moral is to spend your time-as a teenager especially-in the 'real world' rather than online. It also may just be me but: (spoilers to do with Evan) <spoiler>Evan's characterisation wherein he becomes what the reader is positioned to believe is a bit of an 'incel' seems more of a result of the siblings' family life and of some maybe untreated mental health issues, even potentially from how he's seen the narrator be treated by jack, rather than from his unfiltered access to the online world. So it also felt a bit off to see it portrayed this way<spoiler> Overall, I do think this is a good book, and I'd recommend it to people, especially if you're a fan of the author's last book. Just don't go into it expecting a commentary on social media or using technology as a child, it's more of a generic fiction novel with a hint of that. To really hammer that idea home there should have been more explicit elements of it. I did enjoy the novel though, it just left some expectations unmet.

Absolutely loved this! A really thoughtful look at how our access to the internet affects our self worth, body image and sex lives. I'm not sure if I'll buy this for my school library - we do have some adult fiction, and I think that this could be a really powerful book for my older students to read and think about. Just need to think about framing it in the right way! I will, however, recommend it to all my friends as we all love this kind of book!

there are few, if any, aspects of our lives the internet does not fundamentally influence: it impacts how we view our bodies, our lifestyles, our relationships, other people. prasifka's coming-of-age sophomore novel perfectly captures the consequences that come with growing up online, and the unique experience that only younger millennials and older gen-z's have of witnessing the internet's evolution from the very beginning.

prasifka guides us through the protagonist's adolescence as she clicks through google images, virtual pet websites, dodgy chatrooms, hardcore porn, facebook albums filled with digital camera photos, 'poke' notifications, and her own revenge porn. with time and age, the lines between the public and the private blur for our protagonist. as she attempts to navigate romantic, sexual, familial, and platonic relationships, she battles anxiety, sexual desensitisation, fomo, and disassociation, forcing readers to consider how our own online behaviours impact our offline lives.

this book is written entirely in the second person, which i love, and the narrative structure is made up of chronological vignettes of differing lengths and importance. if i hadn't read susannah dickey's 'tennis lessons' - similar in its timescale, geography, themes, and narrative perspective - this might have blown me away a little bit! prasifka's prose is sharp and compulsive, and although there were parts, in my opinion, that added little to the story (the magical realism/body horror metaphor of the hole in the protagonist's stomach, for example), i really enjoyed it, and would 100% recommend!

thank you for the arc!

A moving novel that examines how growing up with the internet has impacted the first generation to really have private access to it. As the technology advanced and became more privately accessible, it opened up a world of abuse that overwhelmed many of the young people who were first to explore chatrooms and social media. We follow a girl growing up from a pre-teen to a young adult, when her family gets their first at-home shared computer, she is instantly transfixed by the internet. We see how it impacts her sense of self, her self-worth in relationships with men, the strength of her relationships with family and friends, and how easily misogyny and abuse managed to explode via the Internet, normalising degrading and exploitative behaviour towards girls and women. This is a timely coming of age that examines the turmoil of becoming a woman, with the introduction of the internet acting as a terrifying and addictive amplifier to that turmoil. I enjoyed Prasifika’s writing style, which portrayed the shame and uncertainty of growing up with rawness but also deep compassion.

Thank you to NetGalley and Canongate Books for the advanced reader copy of this book.

This Is How You Remember It is a novel about growing up online and navigating the public and private spaces. Told in the second person, a girl's family gets a computer when she's nine, and she quickly finds out how great it is that she can find everything, going on virtual pet sites and talking to strangers who become friends. But soon, she's finding darker things, and then social media comes into her life, and her attempts to fit in IRL become blurred with who she might seem online, especially as what is posted online is often beyond her control.

I was drawn to this book because I'm really interested in internet culture and its impacts upon people, plus the blurb describes things like virtual pet sites and emerging social media, which is the era of the internet that I grew up with, and I wasn't disappointed in the way it is immersed in all of this. Particularly for the first half of the book, everything is built around milestones of internet use and misuse, of technology and its impact upon the self, and it is gripping to see this unfold in often horrifying and often realistic ways. The protagonist's learning about shame and self was particularly powerful, starting with going on websites other people might think are uncool or people questioning online friends, and turning into experiences with sex and trauma.

The chilling narrative does calm down a bit as the book goes on, exploring how the protagonist's life and relationships are impacted by social media use and also by things that happened to her in the past, but also leading towards a more hopeful ending, focusing on the offline constant she's had and offering the possibility that people might start healing from things that happened online. I liked that there's a hinted subplot about online male culture, possibly around incel culture though this isn't stated, and it is seen through the second person perspective as something that the female protagonist might ignore or try to block out, which feels very realistic. Generally, the book has some broad takes about gendered social media use in a very heterosexual culture, and it is interesting to see how this plays out as time goes on in the story, and what that might say about the present day.

For me, my interest in the internet side of things and appreciation for how this book delved into some of the darker sides of child internet use, particularly through the early 2000s lens, meant that though I was glad the ending was hopeful, I did want a bit more exploration at the end of some of the key things that had come up earlier. For example, the protagonist's relationship to sex and female sexuality felt like an area that was really explored, particularly through trauma and through a unreal narrative element I won't spoil, but by the end felt like it wasn't quite wrapped up. However, the ending does really explicitly go into the themes of public and private and what this means on the internet and for someone's identity.

This Is How You Remember It is a powerful novel that uses a distinctive tone to chart one history of the internet: a messy, personal one of a protagonist unable to look away from it. Though I'm about the target age in terms of the internet milestones charted in the novel, as a queer person my experiences on the internet (and offline) were quite different, so I'll be interested to see what people who had more similar experiences as those in the book find it. Early on in the book I thought it was going to keep getting darker and darker as the protagonist disappeared into versions of herself online, and maybe I'm slightly disappointed that it didn't go that way, but I can see why the book takes a different approach, offering not just a cautionary tale but some form of conclusion.

3.5*

I'm amazed by how this book gnawed at a familiar feeling inside of me. I can remember how much anxiety (and FOMO at the same time) the internet provides me, most especially that I'm a minor and I stay back from sharing too much personal informations on the internet because of how scarily impactful the result or consequences could be when I look back at it when I'm older.

This thinking that people on my screen could define my worth and that self-sabotaging was good made me reflect upon reading this book. It's rare for a book to capture the essence of truly being inside an experience, and This Is How You Remember It made me feel as though I was going through what the protagonist was going through (it's also in 2nd POV so that contributed too). I think we think too much about what these people on our screen think of us—are we daunting in their own perspectives? Good? Kind? We spend so much time musing about these things that we forget what's actually important, and that's ultimately trying to be the better version of ourselves. People will come and go, so while they're still coming, let's show them that we can be better.