Picador lands ‘online memoir’ by Gibsone

Picador has landed Is This OK? Becoming a Woman on the Internet, a memoir of contemporary womanhood from Harriet Gibsone. 

Paul Martinovic, associate editor, acquired world rights from Ruth Cairns at Featherstone Cairns. Is This OK? will be published in 2023. 

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. 

The publisher wrote: “Attempting to recover from a traumatic birth, Harriet is inexorably drawn into the world of the Instagram mumfluencers and can’t help but compare their birth stories (peaceful, spiritual, life-affirming) with her own (gory, miserable, terrifying). As her life becomes ever more complicated, so do her online obsessions, and she increasingly finds herself asking the same question: ’Is this OK?’”

It is a “raw and laugh-out-loud funny account of growing up against the background hum of the internet" which builds upon a feature she wrote for the Guardian.

Martinovic commented: “It is brutally candid and unafraid of engaging with some truly disquieting themes, while always retaining a wry yet inquisitive perspective, and displaying a commitment to delivering great one-liners on every page. In an exciting way, it feels like the exact mid-point between the work of Patricia Lockwood and Dolly Alderton, and I think readers are going to fall in love with it the same way I did.” 

Gibsone added: “I first logged on to the internet when I was 15 and I haven’t stopped logging on since. The last 20 years of my life have been spent half attempting to shape myself into some kind of adult woman, while half engulfed in the petty dramas and seismic shifts that occur on social media. Like so many people, I am influenced by the words and images I consume online; they fuel my envy, stoke my insecurities and occasionally lead me to happiness. As the websites and platforms have changed over time, so have I.”