Whoever You Are, Honey
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
What happens when what was once considered dystopia is now reality?
This darkly brilliant debut novel explores how women shape themselves beneath the gaze of love, friendship, and the algorithm—“a fever dream for the AI age” (People).
“This book reads like a thriller, but it's also a tender and searching exploration of what it means to inhabit a female body.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
A TIME AND VOGUE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Mitty can’t quite make out the expression on Lena’s face, but she doesn’t look distressed. She looks like nothing at all. She looks like the beginning, before thoughts, a white hallway with no doors, a room so long your voice disappears before it can echo.
On the Santa Cruz, California, waterfront, every house is a flawless glass monolith. Except for one. In a dilapidated bungalow, Mitty and her elderly roommate, Bethel, are the oddball pair who represent the last vestiges of a free-spirited town taken over by the tech elite. But their lives are about to be forever changed when a new couple, Sebastian and Lena, move in next door.
Sebastian is a renowned tech founder and Lena is his spellbindingly perfect girlfriend. But Lena has secrets; she feels uneasy about her oddly spotty memory and is growing increasingly wary of the way Sebastian controls their relationship. Mitty is also hiding something, and the way Lena appears to float through her luxurious life draws Mitty inexorably into her orbit. As the two women begin to form a close friendship, they are finally forced to face their pasts—and the urgent truths that could change everything.
Showcasing Olivia Gatwood’s talent as an essential author for our hyper-digital age, Whoever You Are, Honey is a gripping, seductive, and prescient novel that dissects relationships between women and examines how striving for perfection and desirability plays out in spaces where technology and power intersect.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the stunning debut novel from poet Gatwood (Life of the Party), two young women of disparate means commiserate over their mysterious pasts. Mitty, 28, shares a run-down beach house with her elderly roommate, Bethel, in Santa Cruz, Calif., where she's lived since running away from home 10 years earlier. The pair are the only permanent residents in their neighborhood, which is teeming with tech engineers and college students. Then a rich and beautiful young woman named Lena moves into the glass "dollhouse" next door, which is owned by her boyfriend, Sebastian. By her own account, Lena feels more doll-like than human, and she has no recollection of her life prior to meeting Sebastian. To prove to herself that she's alive, she performs outré acts like stabbing herself with tweezers. She's drawn to Mitty in her quest to feel something, and invites Mitty to ride a roller coaster with her. After Mitty reveals her deepest secret to Lena—it involves the reason she left home—the two go to desperate lengths to come to terms with the past. Gatwood crafts three-dimensional characters and orchestrates the plot to an unpredictable climax that will leave readers questioning everything they've learned about Lena. It's a knockout. Correction: A previous version of this review mistakenly referred to the character Mitty as Milly.
