review of joanna walsh's girl online: a user manual
girl online is to 22-year-old drifting liberal arts college grads what the bell jar is to 16-year-old new york wannabe small-town high school girls (complimentary).
walsh communicates in prose-like language the experience of occupying a girl/woman/female/feminine physical form entangled in the webbed netting of cyberspace. emerson noted that poets (or liberating gods for that matter) give names to feelings, emotions, and experiences that the rest of us brain-rotted individuals lack the language for. this book does exactly that for me. i specifically appreciated the interpolated use of discrete math and logic gates. when i first started learning the programming language known to cyber sapiens as "Python" i began to dream in it. instead of sentences, i spoke in declarations and loops. her writing felt like i was back in that dreamland. of course, i don't think dreaming in programming languages is a prerequisite for this work (but it sure does help).
when my friend (who was living in Florida at the time) sent me this book i felt like the author had somehow tapped my iphone and simply published my 3am notes app files. by far the best book i read in 2022. if you are an oat-milk-iced-flat-white-diet-coke-and-blood-autism-spectrum-miu-miu-web-weaving-feminine-urge-in-my-blank-era girl like myself: read girl online.
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