To be “chronically online”, as a new generation of digital natives knows, is to inhabit a different world. It means being fluent in internet slang. It entails frequent summonses to the court of public opinion, usually convened in the comment section of a Facebook post or X (formerly Twitter) thread. It is adolescence with a pink-hued, low-contrast Instagram filter slapped on.
And it usually starts with an early, innocuous brush with technology. In Irish novelist Catherine Prasifka’s sophomore novel, This Is How You Remember It, a young girl gets a video camera, and, “enthralled” by how she sees herself through its lens, uses it to document a fun day at the beach.
Soon, she trades it for a computer, then a flip phone, then a smartphone. She makes friends she will never meet, builds worlds she can access only through a screen.
Indeed, this is how many people who grew up around the turn of the millennium will remember it. Prasifka’s novel is eerily familiar, and deliberately so. It is narrated in the second person, so when “you” are creating an account on a virtual pet website or browsing images the protagonist should not be looking at, you, the reader, are forced to confront those long-buried teenage memories.
