This is How You Remember It

Thank you NetGalley for providing me this arc!

"You do remember this, don't you? Why don't you?"

Stepping into this novel, I was utterly blown away by this writing and this plot. Prasifka takes stances on our most uncomfortable topics--insecurities, sex, and what growing up as a woman feels like.
This story provides the raw, unfiltered pain of growing up as a woman in a male gazed society.
How do we fit in?
How can we be pretty?
What do I need to change about myself in order to be like everyone else?
Prasifka shares the tale of a woman's life from adolescence to early adulthood that depicts the raw nature of growing up with the internet by your side. We see a young girl discover the dangers of the world through an online forum. The perception of what is 'hot' and how to portray ourselves to gain the male attention. The rawness of watching porn for the first time and feeling unequal to the screen. Our narrator faces the distorted reality of the internet and twists her own self to reflect what she sees in the media.
Seeing a character feel the pain of what it means to be 'pretty' and 'loved' is such a jolting experience--we have all been here. I saw myself in this character; I felt her pain in her negative perception of self.
Throughout this novel, we see this character age and her insecurities grow alongside her. We see her first experience with feeling shame and guilt from looking in the mirror. We see her craft herself into this 'perfect' version of herself to feel like she belongs. This tale is cautionary, it is raw, but most importantly, it is real. Prasifka shows what it is like to be a woman--our darkest moments of our lives written onto paper.

Publication Date: May 1, 2024

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for giving me an ARC to review

4.75 but rounding that up to a 5!!

I just finished this and spent the last 5 minutes crying. I related SO much to this, and it hit me hard with how this was written and the metaphor within it with the hole. I am honestly just at a loss of words on how to review this other that it hit me and wow. I am SO damn happy to have read this. It really felt like things I had thought of myself, about life, etc, were picked and just given to me to read. Thr 75 is purely for my lack of patience and wanting people to just talk things out, haha

Wow.

This Is How You Remember It captures the early wonder and magic of the internet as experienced through a young child, finding pictures of nice pets and later developing innocent penpal-like relationships with other young people online. This gives way quite quickly to accessing disturbing adult material when she is far too young to understand it. Her seemingly quite free or unmonitored access to mature and pornographic material shapes her understanding of how her body should develop and how her adult relationships should look. This understandably has catastrophic effects on her interpersonal relationships as a teenager through to early adulthood, and the shame and humiliation that she faces at the hands of bullying peers is expedited by their access to devices that can record and broadcast her intimate moments.

When I read This Is How You Remember It, I was really struck by the consistent use of the second person, and I eventually interpreted this choice as the protagonist trying to talk to her younger self, but across a huge divide which is before and after her discovery of the internet and computers, and before and after her finally developing a healthy boundary between the self, technology and social media. While I (thankfully) couldn’t relate to some of the more disturbing parts of this book as I was older than the protagonist by the time smartphones made access to the internet immediate and constant, I did find myself really identifying with some elements, or even realising even more clearly how this would have affected people not much younger than me. However, in many places, the “You” makes for an accusatory feeling, like the character is saying “not just me, but you too”, and it makes for an uncomfortable but also very addictive reading experience.

Prasifka uses a strange, yet I think effective, device that is sort of like magical realism in both of her novels that gives a unique dimension to relatable narratives. In This Is How You Remember It, a hole begins to grow in the pit of the protagonist’s stomach after a traumatic incident in her early teens and it grows until she can see right through herself. She becomes obsessed with hiding that even from the people closest to her, presenting a much more composed mask to the outside world to hide and almost eradicate the essence of who she really is.
This is reminiscent of the crack in the sky in her first novel, None of This Is Serious, which is a worldwide disaster the protagonist experiences in the main through the reaction on the internet, which also serves as an allegory of the coronavirus pandemic. I was so impressed of the sustained use of these devises that managed to highlight what was really going on beneath the surface of these novels, while never feeling gimmicky.

I think this book will resonate with a lot of people, particularly in the wide millennial (or millennial - older gen z) age bracket, and particularly how the promise of the internet as something that could bring everyone together really became the great isolator, forcing us all into our own individual phone-shaped prisons and not really offering any escape or alternative except for the ones we make ourselves.

Catherine Prasifka has managed yet again to explore the lives of young people in Ireland as lived in large part through the digital world, a brilliant chronicler of life online yet a one who imbues real heart and emotion in her writing. This will be one of the books everyone is talking about in 2024.

This is How You Remember It by Catherine Prasifka is an insightful and contemporary novel that aligns the coming of age of its young lead character with the growth of the internet . From the early days when as a 9 year-old she uses websites to create virtual pets and make friends to less innocent pursuits and the constant struggle to fit in , being shamed and bullied online,including having an intimate video weaponized and spreading throughout the 'net.
I'm not sure what I found more shocking,the young girl's story or on discussing the book with young people I know being told, "that's the way it is" ,either way it's a powerful and relevant piece of work.
A well-written ,thought-provoking coming of age story that encompasses the influence of the internet,consent,choices and control. Given the subject matter this could have been exploitative,a catalogue of misery or both, Catherine Prosifka deftly addresses a number of difficult issues in an accessible and coherent way .

This is How You Remember It is an insightful novel; one of many in recent years that grapples with the impact of the internet on the first generation of adults who used the internet as children. As part of that generation, reading This Is How You Remember It gave me the uncanny feeling that the author had sliced off the top of my head and was peering into my brain; while my time spent online was less traumatic than the author's unnamed protagonist, so much of it still resonated with me: the good and the bad.

Let me explain. When the narrator of Prasifka's novel is 9, her family gets a computer. She becomes quickly addicted to this inclredible world of information; from new friends to virtual pets, the internet becomes her playground, and begins to shape her personality and worldview. As the novel progresses, we travel through time with the author - told in the second person, I interpreted it as the adult narrator looking back on her formative years. But I also travelled through my own past lived online, the novel lighting up long dormant neural pathways in my brain. Emails to new online friends! Bebo! The suffocating freedom of life online!

The book's depiction of the author's pre-teen and teen years are the most excruiating to read - the narrator finds herself accessing disturbing adult material and speaking to strange men on the internet before she's emotionally ready. This spills over into her real life, changing the way she views relationships with others, especially romantic ones, as well as having a catastrophic impact on her self-esteem.

As the novel progresses, the narrator becomes more focused on the idea of herself she presents on social media, and focuses on becoming that girl in the real world - despite feeling anything but cool and confident. It's heartbreaking to read and has stomach-churning consequences for the narrator. In illustrating these consequences, Prasifka uses a daring and wholly compelling literary device to illustrate the latter - I won't spoil it here, but it works so well, bringing a touch of magical realism to a book grounded firmly in reality.

While This Is How You Remember It feels really bleak at times, there's a love story running concurrently to the excavation of early-internet based trauma. It never feels heavy; despite the dark subject matter, it's an addictive and pacy read - at one point I described myself as "angry whenever I wasn't reading it".

Now, I am absolutely the target market for internet-based millenial-girl novels but as @lauraeatsbooks pointed out, "I think this book will resonate with a lot of people, particularly in the wide millennial (or millennial - older gen z) age bracket, and particularly how the promise of the internet as something that could bring everyone together really became the great isolator, forcing us all into our own individual phone-shaped prisons and not really offering any escape or alternative except for the ones we make ourselves."


Calling this a cautionary tale feels reductive, but Prasifka does offer the reader a map out of the wilds of the internet, into a different sort of life. It's rarely as easy as "switching off", and thankfully the novel side-steps a too-neat ending.

Compelling, dark and deeply resonant, Catherine Prasifka’s sophomore novel is a triumph.

Absolutely brilliant, loved it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me an advance copy, I will definitely be recommending.

This Is How I Remember computers and the internet coming into my childhood. The family computer. The dial-up internet. The A/S/L chats online. The hidden MSN chats. The eventual social media accounts. The top friends. The constantly updated profile photos. The music you chose to play on your profile. The HTML you learnt to make your profile look eDgY. The introduction of broadband + Wi-Fi. The getting your own personal laptop/phone/tablet. The pokes. The constant need to post and update your “friends”. Making things Facebook official. The photo albums of every single social event are catalogued. The untagging of photos you didn’t like. The liking and unliking of posts phase. The whole photo or it didn’t happen phase. Looking back at it all now leaves me feeling exhausted.

If you didn’t live through it, you’d struggle to believe it happened. And yet Catherine has captured what it was like to be there right down to the feelings that were felt at the time. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, just ask anyone born before 1998.

This is Prasifka’s second book and much like her first, I enjoyed it. Both have left me tired of life online and questioning my use of social media/my digital footprint. 2024 is the year I channel my inner Lorcan and fade away on social media ✌🏻

Thank you to Canongate Books + NetGalley for the opportunity to review #ThisisHowYouRememberIt before it publishes. I can’t wait to see what Catherine Prasifka does next. This Is How You Remember It publishes on May 2nd 2024 ✨ #NetGalley

This book will hit differently to anyone who was a preteen and teen during the 2010s, and it will hit hard. Prasifka has managed to convey what it was to be on the internet during that time, and the repercussions it had on our mental health and perception and learning of the world around us. Couldn't stop reading and couldn't but feel for our main character.

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.

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.

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.