A quintessential white, young, plugged-in woman moves to Berlin in a faux journey of self-discovery when her ex-boyfriend dies, shortly after she finds out he runs a very successful fake account as a conspiracy theorist.

This was inevitably polarizing, as people who are like this person are going to feel more singled out than able to laugh, and people of colour probably have no time for this kind of satire, even if it is poking fun at the average almost hot-girl 24/7 Twitter user, middle class, performatively educated, who acts really, really white.

For me, I both recognized the narrator as relatable as she was a great lens to critique a lot of unique factors about internet culture and the generations growing up with it. The tone self-mocks and elides in-jokes people who are also plugged-in would recognize, acknowledging how engaging how superficiality is—especially when embodied as a person, such as the narrator, as well as online presence crafted that way—while also providing a pretty on-point, gut-wrenchingly witty and hilarious satire of our cultivated interests with these alternate online personas.

It wouldn’t have worked if the joke wasn’t on her, and by proxy “us”. It’s not too close to home for me and there is a lot of humanity to be found in an acerbic 20-something going through the same identity crisis, code switching, and new difficulties found in a humanity that, post-social media especially, does not actually have that much in common with other generations, and fundamentally function as an almost different species. Only exacerbated by the fact that performativism and schismatic, axiomatic interactions with people also plugged in do nothing to help identify or alleviate these baffling and unique problems to brains on the internet.

To me, it’s worth laughing about, even if it’s really quite sad. We obviously do find it interesting, as a collective, since social media is a inescapable, all-consuming drug—even if we also judge and shun people participating, but failing, in the same competition for social currency. Which, more or less, is ineffectual anyway. It really is a joke. That’s what’s kind of brilliant about this book: It can approximate ourselves, and humanize us, by proxy.

This is casually transgressive of nearly everything. Unconventional in nearly every way, insulting to nearly everyone, but no one more so than the 20 something “liberals” on Twitter, found to be mostly white upper middle class in an echo chamber. There is a literalized greek chorus as her ex boyfriends, meta post modern techniques used to communicate to the reader in multiple layers of the author, who is an author working on a book who wrote articles. The new kind of faux meta fiction trend is, to me, really engaging and fun to read. It’s also really breathless and self referential, such as when she talks about nothing and then mentions how sometimes nothing can be 40 pages long.

Oh, and the most comical description of a blow job I’ve ever read, which had me in stitches for ages. The audiobook only augments the experience. I was flying through pages but hearing the cadence of the prose enlivened them and made them even more funny; I highly recommend it on audio. Just phenomenal. I’ve rarely laughed so much, nodded along, and cared about someone not all that worth caring about, tbh.