Products You May Like
In Olivia Gatwood’s debut novel, as in life, self-perception is rarely reliable. That uneasy boundary between the real and the perceived is exactly what piques protagonist Mitty’s fascination when she encounters her new neighbors, Lena and Sebastian, outside their glittering glass-walled home on the Santa Cruz waterfront.
At the beginning of Whoever You Are, Honey, Mitty is stuck in a long spiral of stasis and isolation. She lives alongside her much older, equally isolated roommate, Bethel, after a childhood trauma left her directionless and guilt-ridden. Lena, in contrast, seems to perfectly grasp the role she’s meant to play: As idealized girlfriend to tech entrepreneur Sebastian, her days follow a pre-ordained pattern. But as Mitty gets to know Lena, the former starts to understand the latter is just as curious about her supposed perfection as Mitty herself. Lena begins to doubt her ability to see herself clearly; she questions the nature of her reality, and of her humanity. Is she Sebastian’s girlfriend, or his AI creation?
That Gatwood would write such a book—about women, performance, invention, desire, and ambiguity—will hardly surprise those who’ve followed her feminist poetry. Having discovered spoken-word performance at age 13, “at some dingy bar in Albuquerque,” Gatwood says, she “felt like a spell had been put over me.” She joined a youth poetry slam team; within years, she was performing at colleges and touring the country, educating audiences about gendered violence, and building a following on YouTube and Instagram.
When the idea for Whoever You Are, Honey, came to her, Gatwood knew it needed to take the form of a novel. Most of her poetry—including the collections Life of the Party and New American Best Friend—is autobiographical, she says. This new idea had a set of characters, “a narrative arc that was something beyond me and my own life experience. So I just followed that instinct.”
The result is a novel not only about invention in the form of technology, but also “how we invent our entire identities in the context of our relationships, and in the context of our own self-perception and desirability,” Gatwood says. That perception—reliable or otherwise—is key to our sense of stability. “What makes people afraid of AI is the inability to tell whether it’s [AI],” she continues. “And so, to me, it feels like that’s an important experience for the reader to have [in the book], too. It’s an important experience for Mitty to have and for Lena to have about herself.”
Ahead, Gatwood discusses what made her first want to write about a “fembot” in Santa Cruz, her own relationship with performance online, and the upcoming film adaptation of Whoever You Are, Honey.
When did the seed of this idea settle in and become something you wanted to write?
I was living in Santa Cruz with my partner at the time, and he was friends with a lot of men who worked in tech, so I inevitably ended up in a circle of people whom I’d really never experienced before. I hadn’t spent that much time with men in a long time, to be completely honest. And it was, by the way, not bad. I found these men to be charismatic and fun to be around, and [they thought] about the future in interesting ways.
I also am a critic, and [one] that often looks at things through a feminist lens. I began to think about the long canon of stories about fembots and what it means and why technology has always seemed preoccupied with the idea of women as sex objects, and helpers, and personal assistants. Why does technology, which is a space that should be invested in change and the future, still seem so caught up in these regressive gender roles?
I started wondering what it would be like to meet a fembot, very simply. So many stories about fembots are ones where we watch this male inventor fall in love with or develop a relationship to his creation—then, eventually, wrestle with her sentience. And I wanted to write a story where the center of that story was women. How a woman might relate to that [fembot].
What scenes did you find most difficult to write, given the thread of ambiguity that runs throughout this book?
Actually, the scenes I had to rework the most were the sex scenes. I had never really written sex scenes before. And sex felt important in this book, because tech in general is a really sexualized space.
I wanted the relationship between Lena and Sebastian to be, very clearly, one that is rooted in desire. But I also needed to make sure that the sex felt intentional, not gratuitous, not too erotica. It’s hard to write a sex scene that doesn’t feel corny. So much of the book is also about gaze and projection. So, it felt important that the sex we’re seeing, we’re watching it through another character’s eyes as she’s witnessing it.
You have your own sizable following on social media; a lot of your growth was on YouTube, initially. Tech has woven itself into the fabric of your career. With that in mind, how do you think about your own social media and “tech” footprint, and how it shapes your work?
I’m highly wary of social media. I recognize how helpful it has been to my career, and I feel so resistant to it often. I feel resistant to getting on new apps. I feel like, Okay, I’m on Instagram. I’m going to stay on Instagram. I can’t start down these other things, because it feels unnatural and distracting. I do have to fight that instinct, because I also feel afraid of becoming irrelevant. That’s what social media has done: It has made it so that, if you’re not on it, you feel this sense of irrelevance. In that way, you feel like you need it to literally exist.
I’m always trying to check my relationship to it. I monitor closely how I present myself on it. I do feel a responsibility to offer both an accurate portrait of who I am, but also preserve my sense of privacy. I want both to be true at the same time.
The thing about social media is you can see your audience at all times. If I didn’t have social media, I would only see my audience when I go into a reading. Being able to see that audience all the time can be super validating, and ego-boosting, and exciting. And it can also make you so hyperaware of being looked at, and hyper-neurotic around preserving that gaze as a way of preserving your career or your worth or whatever. I want to have my eyes open to any stories I start telling myself about that.
Do you primarily view social media as a performance—as an art of self-creation—or rather as a potential avenue for revealing the self?
If I were to choose one, I would see it more as performance and curation. Again, I really try not to interact with [social media] that way, because I also feel that that’s what’s really hurtful about it. It completely removes us from each other’s humanity to be only engaging with each other’s most curated selves. It creates a world of moral and aesthetic purity that I think is unrealistic.
I also do recognize the parts of it that are so helpful; it’s so helpful to have access to communities outside of your own. It gives us the ability to see what’s happening in the world, when otherwise we might’ve counted on sources that are unreliable.
Do you feel as though tech’s emphasis on minimalism and efficiency—as you’ve noted before, in your writing and in other interviews—is already making the art we consume less vibrant?
Yeah, I do. If we’re just even thinking about, aesthetically, the difference between a desk made out of particle wood, versus something that was carved out of redwood—just with industrialization, we can see the decline of art. I think that what makes humanity so beautiful is our maximalist nature. We are these massive, complicated, messy, inconsistent beings, and tech is not that.
I worry that tech is reflecting humanity less and less, and is actually just reflecting itself.
Do you see a world in which AI becomes an artistic tool? And when I say an artistic tool, I don’t mean an efficiency tool, but a way of making art more vibrant.
I think it’s possible. I think that that’s what’s scary about technology, is that it can do anything. If technology wants to get good at something, it can get good at something. And if it wants to mimic something, it can probably mimic something. So I do think we could get to a point where AI is able to emulate or create products that feel vibrant and engaging. That worries me, because I think taking art from people and putting in the hands of a machine is just…scary.
I want to switch gears and ask about the movie adaptation of this book. Lucky Chap and Indian Paintbrush have bought the rights, and you’re signed on to write the script. If you could make any particular version of this film exist, what do you envision?
Making movies takes a really long time, but it’s in the works, and hopefully, we’ll develop [it] faster rather than slower.
I didn’t want to write this book with the intention of making it into a movie, because I wanted to make sure it was a book. But I do think I am a cinematic person. My writing has always been really visual. I care about place, I care about geography, I care about plants, I care about color, I care about texture. So, I think the book will translate well in that way.
And there are things that could happen on a screen that I might’ve been more resistant to include in the book. It might be a less ambiguous ending in a film, because we have access to different tools. I’m excited to play with those things and preserve the tone and the theme of the book, while also allowing myself to venture into the other opportunities that film provides.
So much of your writing has had the purpose of addressing and, ideally, serving girls and women. How do you hope this book fulfills that goal?
I think it’s healing for girls who are growing up in a world where so much of their behavior and identity is wrapped up in [a] gaze, specifically [the] male gaze. I know, as a teenager, I feel like everything I did was dictated by my understanding of my own desirability. It prevented me from having human relationships rooted in joy and curiosity.
I hope that showing women having a conversation in a room—between Mitty and Bethel, between Mitty and Lena, between Bethel, Mitty and Lena—is both inspiring and also validating, and maybe refreshing. I think that sounds simple, and it is, but it also can be really hard to access in our lives.
Because [these characters are] intergenerational, I hope that women of all ages can see themselves in the book. I’ve learned so much from older women in my life, women who have already surpassed some of the stages I’m in and are in a place that seems jaded, but is actually really radical.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.