Book review: This Is How You Remember It is a resonant portrait of a life lived online

This Is How You Remember It

By Catherine Prasifka
Fiction/Canongate Books/Paperback/279 pages/$28.10/Amazon SG (

amzn.to/4bXpDKF

)
4 stars

To be “chronically online”, as a new generation of digital natives knows, is to inhabit a different world. It means being fluent in internet slang. It entails frequent summonses to the court of public opinion, usually convened in the comment section of a Facebook post or X (formerly Twitter) thread. It is adolescence with a pink-hued, low-contrast Instagram filter slapped on.

And it usually starts with an early, innocuous brush with technology. In Irish novelist Catherine Prasifka’s sophomore novel, This Is How You Remember It, a young girl gets a video camera, and, “enthralled” by how she sees herself through its lens, uses it to document a fun day at the beach. 

Soon, she trades it for a computer, then a flip phone, then a smartphone. She makes friends she will never meet, builds worlds she can access only through a screen. 

Indeed, this is how many people who grew up around the turn of the millennium will remember it. Prasifka’s novel is eerily familiar, and deliberately so. It is narrated in the second person, so when “you” are creating an account on a virtual pet website or browsing images the protagonist should not be looking at, you, the reader, are forced to confront those long-buried teenage memories. 

This is no pleasant time capsule, and Prasifka – who was born in 1996 – details the excruciating ordeal of growing up online with the unflinching intimacy of someone who experienced it first-hand. 

Technology inflicts all manner of pain on the protagonist. At age nine, a friend she meets on a role-playing forum suddenly cuts communication, leaving the girl wondering if the game and friendship “meant something entirely different” to her friend.  

Then, online interactions start bleeding into real life. She discovers by hacking into a friend’s social media account that another girl in their clique wants to kick her out of the group. The discovery feels like a “hot knife to the gut”. She is engulfed with agony and ostracised at school. 

It gets worse. Her first kiss is captured on camera and disseminated to the entire cohort. She breaks up with a boyfriend and he retaliates by spreading revenge porn. It is a chilling reminder of the dystopia teenagers and children willingly walk into, where the only saving grace is the internet’s short attention span. Personal tragedies are eventually buried in the incessant cycle of online chatter. They are earth-shattering and, at the same time, utterly mundane. 

Standing in stark contrast to the protagonist is her friend, Lorcan. Here is a boy who has somehow managed to resist the lure of social media. For his self-control, he is rewarded with a wholesomeness that makes him a sweet, if uncompelling, love interest. 

Thankfully, the narrator’s other friends, who are petty, sinister and earnest in the way only teenage girls can be, add enough colour to make the story pop. Coupled with Prasifka’s acute delineation of the protagonist’s inner world, they make for a powerful coming-of-age story. 

But as a cautionary tale, the novel fails to sound any new alarms. 

Warnings about the dangers of social media have abounded for as long as these websites have been popular. Yes, a lifelong internet addiction leaves an inexhaustible digital trail that can come back to haunt you at any time. Yes, being glued to your phone makes it difficult to live in the present. And by this point, do we really need another reminder that people often forge idealised identities for themselves online? 

Maybe this reviewer, who was also born in the 1990s, is just too chronically online. Prasifka did say in an interview with Irish lifestyle and culture publication, Image Magazine, that those who did not grow up with the internet have been horrified by the episodes described in her book. 

In any case, it is a message that deserves to be pinned at the forefront of public consciousness, especially in a world that always seems on the verge of being overrun by some new, increasingly unwieldy form of technology. It reminds readers of the human cost of every post, share and comment, and poses a radical (in 21st-century terms, at least) question: What if you just put your phone away?

If you like this, read: Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener (MCD Books, 2020, $23.64, Amazon SG, go to

amzn.to/4bchSPE

). The one thing more sinister than social media is the ruthless corporate machine behind it. This piercing memoir charts a young woman’s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley in an era of reckless ambition.