If Just Watch Me wanted chat to be more roadblock than direct dialogue, there would be more than a single instance where it wasn’t presented linearly in time. None of the chaos-parsing skills required in real chat is necessary for the book. Maybe the nested boxes of tweet, reply, retweet, which are sometimes cross-posted as screenshots on competing social media sites, might halt some readers that weren’t terminally online. Additionally, I am aware that using the word “retweet” is a lot like how my dad referred to the refrigerator the “icebox” for my whole childhood.

At its heart, Just Watch Me is a frictionless first-person fiction novel where the narrator is a bit clever–“My tears retreat when I spy Dr. Dole down the hall. Head neurologist, a redundant title.”–and bit of a mess: “The New York Harbor is right over there. I could cannonball in, sink or swim. There are so many ways to have a mental breakdown, the options are nearly paralyzing. But if I’m going to fall completely apart, I might as well do it in front of an audience.” She just happens to fall into competitive spicy-eating livestreaming, which is more a vehicle for self-harm than a rousing story of competitive stakes.

There’s a bit of a mystery, too, because the narrator’s sister is in a coma. If you want to read this book without knowing the plot, go read it, come back in a day, and consider yourself lucky I warned you that I no longer dance around what happens within plots…

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