In 2001, when Gibsone was 14, she discovered MSN messenger, which rapidly became, as she puts it, “an urgent state of being”. We didn’t know all of that when we first went online, back when the internet seemed to offer a thrilling sort of social freedom. That is, of course, where many of us spend hours each day, without fully realising it, even as researchers warn us of the negative impact on self-esteem and mental health. Many illuminate a bigger truth about living at this peculiar time and in the grey area between the online and offline worlds. She chooses episodes from her life and makes some of them funny – laugh-out-loud-on-the-train funny some of them are frightening and sad. Gibsone came of age at the same time as the internet, her own development shaped by its strange currents. Is This OK? is a memoir, full of finely told stories that were once secrets existing only in the writer’s mind addictions, obsessions, weirdnesses. I love these characters, nurturing as they do some feeling of control in a world where they do not have any. Harriet the Spy was banned in a number of American schools apparently morally upright people didn’t approve of watchful girls trying to figure out the world on their own terms. Now in her late 30s, she still shares with the fictional Harriet a powerful imagination and endless fascination with others. Harriet Gibsone did the same thing when she was young. Harriet the Spy is a 1964 childrens’ book about a little girl who snoops relentlessly on her neighbours.
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