A tragedy of a young girl destroyed by a smartphone army
None of This is Serious, Catherine Prasifka’s 2022 debut novel, was carefully attuned to how so much of reality today is filtered through screens. Take the novel’s principal character, Sophie, a recent graduate living in Dublin, who’s working out what to do next while doom-scrolling on her phone. “I feel closer to him in cyberspace than I do in real life,” she reflects of a love interest. “I feel closer to myself in cyberspace as well.”
Prasifka’s second novel doubles down on this same theme. This is How You Remember It introduces us to a protagonist whose life is wholly mediated by the internet. It shapes both the way she views the world, and – much more disruptively – the way the world views her.
Via a claustrophobic second-person voice that has the unsettling air of voyeurism, in the first chapter we’re introduced to a seven-year-old girl experimenting with her father’s video camera on a family holiday. Through its lens, ordinary scenes are transformed into something new and mesmerising. Meanwhile, hidden behind the device, young Sophie is afforded a degree of anonymity: “Your mother nods and picks up the fallen flask. She turns away from you, and embraces your grandmother. The two of them are laughing, as they have done on this beach together many times. You find watching them fascinating. Your father is methodically unpacking things from bags, not saying anything. No one is paying attention to you.”
It’s the beginning of an addiction. The family’s first computer introduces the now-nine-year-old to cyberspace. An innocent obsession with a virtual pet website soon leads to forays into the darker reaches of the web. “At first, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at; the image is so strange that you confuse shadows with hard lines and lose sense of the shape of everything,” writes Prasifka, giddily capturing the weirdness of stumbling across pornography at an age when you haven’t even grasped the basic mechanics of sex. “The image is peach; brown; pink. You think you see a face, maybe, and some skin. It’s like an optical illusion. It reminds you of raw chicken, something you’ve seen at the butchers.”
The years go by, and social media sites become extensions of the protagonist’s offline relationships. Her first kiss is filmed and posted online for everyone to comment on. Next come the nude pictures that constitute 21st-century teenage foreplay. A dumped boyfriend gets revenge by posting a sex video online, filmed without Sophie’s knowledge or permission.
This is a coming-of-age story written with the oppressive propulsion of a thriller. Slow it down, though, and the clichés come into focus. “The computer has become an extension of yourself. You no longer form conscious intents, you simply act,” Prasifka writes. “Fiction and reality start to blend in your mind… What matters is that there’s always a new video for you to watch. You’re driven by a fierce need to keep consuming.”
The novel also advances a similarly predictable depiction of messed-up teenage body images and porn-skewed attitudes to sex. When a boy grabs her breasts at school, the protagonist thinks: “You don’t understand why you feel this way, and rationalise that it must be because you’ve done something wrong. You think it would be better if you weren’t here; if you just vanished.”
Beneath all this runs a love story that gains traction as the novel progresses. It’s a sort of “will they, won’t they” awkward romance, but he exists as something of a fixed certainty, while she’s the one who needs saving; from other men, but also from herself. Its conclusion is too schmaltzy for my taste – true love will bring the protagonist the feeling of completeness she has been missing – but Prasifka braids the couple’s waxing and waning story into the narrative with admirable suppleness. None of This is Serious was nominated for the Irish Book Awards; with this “difficult” second novel behind her, I’m intrigued to see where Prasifka goes next. Offline, I hope.
This is How You Remember It is published by Canongate at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
