You Have a New Memory
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- 125,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
An open-hearted interrogation of our digital selves, braiding cultural criticism, memoir, and narrative musings into an exploration of identity, girlhood, media, tech, nature and "finding the depth and beauty in the f****d-up world we live in" from a writer, artist, and influencer (Phoebe Bridgers).
YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY is a deeply human inventory of the digital sphere, a searing analysis of the present and a prescient assessment of the future. In her highly anticipated debut, Aiden Arata brings us raw reportage from the liminal space between online and offline worlds, illuminating how we got here and where to go next.
With high-res, cosmic vision and razor-sharp wit, this kaleidoscopic collection of essays artfully explores what it means to exist on the internet. Arata exposes influencer grifts from the perspective of a grifter, digs into the alluring aesthetic numbness of stay-at-home girlfriend content creators, and interrogates our online fetishization of doom to grapple with the real-world apocalypse.
Arata is the wry, unexpected voice we need to navigate existing simultaneously as creators, consumers, and products in our increasingly braver and newer world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This probing debut collection from essayist Arata reflects on her relationship with the digital world and its distorting effects on reality. In "America Online," Arata likens the corrupting influence of the internet to J.R.R. Tolkien's One Ring, recounting how as a teenager, she used an instant messenger account named after a Lord of the Rings character to flirt with an acquaintance who developed feelings for the made-up avatar before cutting off contact after catching on to the ruse. "The Museum of Who I Want to Be for You" meditates on the inauthenticity of social media by describing Arata's experiences at a rigidly choreographed "meme conference" at the headquarters of an unnamed app heavily implied to be Instagram. The standout "How to Do the Right Thing" ruminates on the nature of online relationships by discussing how social media put the unnamed narrator (the essay is written in second person) in touch with an amateur comedian who sexually assaulted her, even as it facilitated the narrator's friendship with another woman he'd assaulted. Observations on the internet's uncanniness are well trod, but Arata succeeds in making them feel fresh with memorable storytelling and sinewy prose ("The internet, like a plastic bag, is a container that is both disposable and forever, and when we use the internet we become disposable and forever too"). This will resonate with the chronically online.
