Just Watch Me
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this visceral, darkly hilarious, and surprisingly moving debut novel about a charismatic misfit who livestreams herself for seven straight days to raise money for her comatose sister's life support
‘Propulsive, witty and deranged - I couldn’t put it down. If you’re a fan of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, you will love this book.’ Nussaibah Younis, author of Fundamentally
‘Fans of Melissa Broder, Rufi Thorpe and Ottessa Moshfegh will laugh, cringe, empathise, and be mesmerised by the spectacle of one woman’s attempt to solve all her financial and emotional problems in the most adventurous, public and high-stakes way possible. Just Watch Me is addictive and propulsive.’ Emily Gould, author of Perfect Tunes
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual, spiking stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plant propagations to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise $14,000 for a week of private life support for Daisy.
In the dungeon of her stream, Dell is in control, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms of engagement and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. On a dare, she discovers that she has a talent for eating spicy food, and her streaming fame explodes as her pepper consumption graduates from jalapeño to habanero to ghost. Finally, Dell is good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and riskier and a troll-turned-incel threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens us through a nonstop week in the life of this charismatic misfit with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both an incisive, zippy tragicomedy about the internet economy as well as a moving meditation on love, loss, and forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Torenberg debuts with a bewitching tragicomedy about a young woman who takes drastic actions to raise money for her sister's medical bills. Dell Danvers has just lost her job when she learns her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma from an accidental drug overdose. The reader gathers from Dell, a spectacularly unreliable narrator, that Daisy has no brain activity and will be taken off life support unless her family can pay the hospital bills. To raise the money, Dell begins livestreaming her life, earning revenue by accepting dares from viewers, such as eating five jalapeño peppers. For her next round, she eats habaneros. The stunts earn her the attention of Patrick, a LiveCast blogger who makes his living eating spicy foods. Patrick invites her to collaborate with him, and they eat ghost pepper sauce on burgers and then actual ghost peppers together, garnering Dell more money toward her $14,000 goal. She faces trouble when she rejects the sexual advances of another blogger named Casper and he starts digging into her life. Dell might have a tenuous hold on reality, but she's a captivating and endearing narrator. Readers will enjoy this wild ride.
