This Is How You Remember It by Catherine Prasifka

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.