This is an unflinching look into one woman’s internet habits, and while I don’t think it will be for everyone, I personally found it to be an interesting read.

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 realities of illness and motherhood.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. 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). It’s not her fault that this is her life. She is just trying to promote positive birth stories so others aren’t afraid. But maybe they should be frightened? Women and babies still die in birth, and it’s not because they’ve not meditated hard enough; it’s because it’s seismic and unpredictable. And once the pain and blood of birth have finished, you are filled with psychological savagery on the other side. The first few days of motherhood are brutal. The level of high-functioning performance required is unparalleled. It’s like stumbling on stage at the start of the Oscars, your body bloodied and broken from a plane crash, and you’re handed a mic and told you’re hosting the whole gig, but if the jokes aren’t good enough, the audience dies. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

Something 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. There is melancholy, too, in the gaps between how people feel and how they act. Seamus’s interior critiques of contemporary poetry are perceptive, but in seminars he is petulant. Fyodor, one of the non-students, has beautiful thoughts but doesn’t know how to express them and lapses into silence. Fatima has to work to support herself, which alienates her fellow dancers, more or less oblivious to their privilege, and she never really manages to make her friends understand. Despite the characters’ frequent self-absorption, the novel’s mood is one of tenderness and yearning. 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. the first: her early twenties, as she juggles her young career as a music journalist with incessantly stalking pretty much everyone who enters her orbit online.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 Persistently funny, ill-advisedly honest and deadly accurate . . . My mind is blown -- Caitlin Moran, author of More Than a Woman coming of age in the early days of the internet was an acid trip for most millennials and older gen-zs, but for harriet gibsone, logging on for the first time marked a disquieting seismic shift in her character that she fears she will never recover from. 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.