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

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Initially this book was a relatable and fun read, about the author’s self doubts and insecurities and her obsession with stalking people online, all told in a witty, self-deprecating style. Unfortunately, as the book continued in the same vein throughout, with little hope of personal growth or development, it began to feel repetitive, long-winded and dreary. 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. 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 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.

I’m a bit unsure on my thoughts for this one. I did enjoy reading it, and despite being that bit younger, I found it quite relatable in a way that I think most people, in their thirties and under, will - we’re so very easily drawn in to our phones, and we so easily make assumptions on other people based on what they have posted online. However the author tends to take that to the extreme, feverishly looking over partners ex-girlfriends digital footprints, hyperfixating on a fellow commuter (while struggling with personal issues), developing para-social relationships with influencers, and hearing Alexa Chung as the disparaging voice in her head. And so begins a dual journey: my quest to get pregnant, and my battle against the demon hormones’: Harriet Gibsone with her son. Photograph: Kate Peters/The Guardian 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 corporeal realities of illness and motherhood. Just read this from its giggly heights to its mortifying depths . . . I feel like I've been through something. Something really worth going through. -- Frank Cottrell-BoyceSomething 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. Anushka also speaks to Dr Lynne Robinson, a gynaecologist at Birmingham women’s hospital and council member of the British Menopause Society, about why menopause is belittled as an insignificant problem – and what can be done to improve diagnosis for younger women.

My baby,” I cry, as he is raised from between my legs and immediately moved on to a table. The doctors huddle around his body. Mark is devastated. The baby is unresponsive, blue and limp. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” I tell Mark. I am as high as a kite from the epidural, but I am certain, from the depths of my soul, that he will survive. Mark puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s OK,” I smile. While the overall theme of the book is internet culture, and the authors relationship to that, it also has a pretty interesting look into the indie music scene of 2007-2010, as she was working for a free music magazine during that time period. I've seldom seen such extreme soul-bearing and admission of dysfunctional behaviour. It's a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash. Hoodwinking her audience into thinking she is flawed and chaotic, just as susceptible to heartache and humiliation as the rest of us. Using her alleged inadequacies to puncture the veneer of superiority and manipulate the public into investing in her. It’s a classic trait of a good old-fashioned people-pleaser, fearful of the displeasure of others, willing to throw oneself under the bus in a plea for connection, approval and love. 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."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

In 1972, the Apollo 17 mission took a photograph from space that changed the perception of how people saw the Earth. The picture became known as “The Blue Marble” because it showed not a green planet but a blue one. Every land mass is surrounded by a single interconnected ocean that acts, says the physicist Helen Czerski, as “a gigantic engine, a dynamic liquid powerhouse” that “takes sunlight and converts it into giant underwater currents and waterfalls, hauling around the ingredients for life”. 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. Brain fog leaves me exhausted and unable to form a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. I haven’t had a period for a year 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. as a writer myself, I found myself relating so heavily to Harriet's experiences with people she obsesses over online and thinks are too amazing and beautiful and talented to ever live up to. she's constantly acutely aware of her own feelings of imposter syndrome, feeling too basic, untalented, and stupid... always comparing herself to those around her who seem to be able to have original ideas and know how to pull the right words from their brain always at the right times, while she's too busy looking at these people for the right opinions so she can then somehow try to craft her own work and tweets. based on this book alone, however, it's exceptionally clear that Harriet is absolutely not a fake: she's the real deal and she's got the talent to prove it—even if it writing about her own life in this way is what took her to truly find it.I call my sister Libby. Seven years older than me, often in a car with her two boys, she’s the person I normally turn to when things get real. She’s driving and I’m on speakerphone. I am touched by her speedy, warm and honest response but a bit perturbed as to why I sent the message in the first place. Days before, I’d listened to an episode of her podcast in which she reassured listeners that it’s fine to feed your body whatever it asks for in the first trimester, and that she just ate potatoes. So why did I send it? I then vow to keep her at arm’s length, painfully aware that I’m never more than one G&T-in-a-can away from becoming the type of person who writes “Well done hun, you’re stronger than you’ll ever know” underneath a post from a former Towie cast member whose miniature schnauzer has just been diagnosed with diabetes. 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. 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 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.

As I haemorrhage everywhere, I am handed my son for what feels like 20 minutes. I have a bad internal tear. The first set of stitches goes wrong, and the doctors wheel me into theatre, leaving Mark in a room filled with my blood and the overwhelming presence of our tiny naked son. She tells Anushka Asthana the powerful and occasionally hilarious story of her search for a diagnosis, the battle to control her raging hormones, and a newfound quest to have a baby. Sadly, as the book continued into her adult life, I started to feel less connected and more worried about her. Her addiction to the internet and cyberstalking celebrities or any random person she meets (seriously, no one is safe) became less funny and relatable, and instead more deranged and a bit unhinged. She comes across as proud of her cyber sleuthing and she is so keen to bare everything in her book, I’m surprised no one took her hand and told her that maybe this isn’t something the whole world needs to know.Is This Okay' by Harriet Gibsone is like watching a demolition derby that’s starting to get out of hand; you go from mildly entertained to watching the flames rising and carnage turning bloody, and you find yourself starting to think “um, maybe someone should stop this.” Being a similar age to Harriet, I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the references to things such as My Space but otherwise I found this quite tough going. It's a slightly unusual premise for an autobiography as Harriet isn't a celebrity, nor has she lived through a major event which is why most people would read this kind of book. 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. I’ve come to realise my relationship with the internet is an infidelity: a remorseless, ongoing affair with the fringes of humanity, while I am in a stable relationship with all of my friends and relatives. I find it impossible to believe that I will have the strength to give up this habit for ever. But at least now there is a growing awareness of my fortune, and of the dangers of wasted time. 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.