This Is How You Remember It: Portrait of a life in the digital age

This Is How You Remember It

Author: Catherine Prasifka

ISBN-13: 978-1805300991

Publisher: Canongate

Guideline Price: £16.99

Posting. Sharing. Swiping. “Messages coming in faster than you can read” and the world reduced to mere “alerts and banner notifications”. It feels normal but it isn’t. It has been engineered. It is engineering us in turn through short-cycle dopamine hits and commodified FOMO. You’re thinking about scrolling through your socials right now, aren’t you?

Well, leave them be and consider Catherine Prasifka’s sophomore novel instead, an unflinching account of growing up online in Ireland today. It is a coming-of-age tale that actively questions how the internet distorts the lives of young people. As such it is the very definition of “timely”.

A kind of spiritual prequel to 2022′s None of This is Serious (which had its own concerns about social media), This Is How You Remember It follows an unnamed protagonist from prepubescence through her years in university. A computer comes into the family home early in the book (“This thing will change your life”) and, with it, the protagonist’s burgeoning internet addiction. Prasifka’s depiction of this is unwavering. It fully captures the sense of tech-enabled disembodiment that comes with virtual spaces such as forums and chat rooms (indeed, Prasifka conducts such a piercing critique that an equally valid title for the novel could easily have been This is How you Remember IT!)

[ Quarter of children aged 8 to 12 experienced cyberbullying in the last year, report finds ]

Such a near constant emphasis on the mediation of camera lenses and curated profiles has the potential to be distancing to readers, of course, but Prasifka counterbalances this by adopting second-person narration throughout. It is a risk, and a tough trick to pull off well (one is reminded of, among other things, Claire Keegan’s story The Parting Gift), but Prasifka owns this choice and fashions from it an immediacy and a frequently brutal honesty which prove to be the hallmarks of the novel.

She uses these to deliver a convincing portrait of a girl, then a teen, then a young woman attempting to find and define herself in a world where the traditional arenas of maturation – the friend’s bedroom, the disco, the trip to Irish college – gain intangible, contradictory and often troubling annexes in a plethora of unsupervised digital realms.

[ Niamh Mulvey: ‘I thought people who wrote books were in a different category of brain. I didn’t think I had that’ ]

[ Age checks for social media aimed at protecting primary schoolchildren are ‘broken’, says Norma Foley ]

It is worth noting here that Prasifka holds advanced degrees in fantasy literature from the University of Glasgow (a terrific programme) as well as in Irish folklore from UCD. Her conversant ease with these fields unlocks a wider vernacular through which to communicate the strangeness of a perpetually online life and so broadens the emotional palette of This is How You Remember It in interesting ways (the same was true of the crack in the sky in None of This Is Serious). There are, for example, themes and observations about digitality in this book that would not go amiss in the subgenre of, say, cyberpunk (“The computer has become an extension of yourself”) or in speculative fiction more broadly (“Your friend group is a hive mind”). Yet they never tear at the narrative integrity of the novel. She integrates them smoothly.

They are in fact all the more unsettling for the very ordinary context in which Prasifka deploys them. Which is to say that they enhance the traditional Bildungsroman fare, an aspect of the book which is rather brilliantly executed. For This Is How You Remember It is about – and please forgive the now tainted terminology – disruption. The novel takes a cold-eyed view of how tech amplifies the anxieties and cruelties of adolescence. Private moments play out on public platforms. Intimate-image abuse and online misogyny are shockingly normalised. Violations are staged as crude entertainment and, as in real life, people suffer as a consequence.

[ Jo Spain: ‘I rely on the next book, contract or TV show to pay that mortgage. I’ve no guaranteed salary’ ]

“Maybe we can hold off on the status update for, like, five minutes” Prasifka’s protagonist is asked at one point. And in that, perhaps, is distilled the central conflict of the novel: selfie versus self, the denial of one’s actual identity for the dubious pleasures of a virtual thumbs-up from a stranger and the detrimental feedback loop which this engenders.

Though Prasifka’s protagonist builds resilience to such things in fits and starts across the novel, her lowest ebbs resonate with how individuals lose control of their bodies to the online discourse of other people. It frequently feels like social media has a destructive presence and power over her (and, by extension, us) which seems inescapable, but, as Ursula K Le Guin once put it, so too did the divine right of kings.

Prasifka, with her continued interrogation of social media in hugely compelling novels such as this, seems poised to capture a similar energy and, in the process, carve out a distinctive niche in contemporary Irish fiction. We would all do well to like and subscribe.