The journalist’s eye-wateringly honest account of searching for connection online is relatable, funny and wise
As a child, Harriet Gibsone would spend hours sitting with a friend on the roof of a rotting wooden playhouse, staring into the front room of an elderly couple who lived over the fence. This illicit hobby was an oddly mesmerising exercise in anthropology. It was also an early manifestation of what she dubs her “inherent lurk-mode compulsion”, an urge that morphs into a full-blown addiction in adulthood, thanks to the internet and its opportunities for snooping.
Her eye-wateringly honest and all-too-relatable memoir takes its title from the question she is eventually forced to ask herself. Is it all right to be obsessively deep-diving into the online profiles of professional rivals, long-ago exes, your therapist’s ex’s new boyfriend?
