Olivia Gatwood

This darkly brilliant debut novel explores how women build themselves—beneath the gaze of love, friendship, and the algorithm—showcasing Olivia Gatwood as a thrilling feminist voice for our hyper-digital age. Only when Lena stepped into that house did she realize what she’d been missing. A life. An entire life. There’s no way Sebastian would have planned for that epiphany. Because as soon as she had it, she felt the urge to run. On the Santa Cruz waterfront, every house is as flawless as the people inside—except for Mitty and her elderly roommate, Bethel. For ten years, Mitty has found refuge in their secluded existence after a traumatic adolescence. Now, they’re the oddball pair in the dilapidated bungalow, the last vestiges of a town taken over by the tech elite. But their lives are about to be irrevocably disrupted when a new couple, Lena and Sebastian, move in next door. Because on the quiet outskirts of Silicon Valley, nothing is off-limits, and what was once considered dystopia is now reality... Sebastian is a renowned tech founder and Lena is his spellbinding girlfriend, seemingly floating through their luxurious life. But just like Mitty, Lena has her own secrets; she feels uneasy about her oddly spotty memory, and is growing increasingly wary of the way Sebastian closely controls their life together. As the two women begin to form a close friendship, they are finally forced to face their pasts—or lack thereof—which have overpowered their lives for far too long, and the urgent truths that could change everything. A kind of Stepford Wives meets Grey Gardens for the age of artificial intelligence, Whoever You Are, Honey is gripping, seductive, and prescient as it dissects relationships between women, unpacks perfection and desirability, and explodes the intersection of passion, technology, and power.

A Novel

Whoever You Are, Honey

Lindsay

Thank you for rescuing me. Fuck you for keeping me. Where do we go from here?

Maybe there was someone else out there like her, reminiscing about a time he’d never lived through.

Mitty can hardly remember what it’s like to bask in the smell of another person’s breath. To feel their spit on your chin and choose not to wipe it off.

“Women don’t have to like each other to be friends.”

He was more passionate about her potential than her past. It was rare to find that in a man, she thought, someone who doesn’t feel threatened by all the things you could become.

Never once has she experienced nightmares of looming tsunamis, sinking ships, plunging canyons in the deepest parts of the Atlantic. Of course she understands the fear. But it seems unproductive to be afraid of something so infinite, something that couldn’t be aware of your presence, that would never even target you, but instead simply overwhelm you without any sense you’d ever stood in its way. But maybe that’s what people are really afraid of— being irrelevant—

“No one is honest about the ways they make money, why should homeless people be?”

What must it feel like to be so aligned with the fact of your beauty, Mitty thinks, that you assume the questions you ask will be answered, the invitations you make will be accepted, the strangers you bother will celebrate your interruption?

Mitty had an art teacher once who claimed that there are two kinds of people: those who paint and those who sculpt. It’s one thing to look at a blank canvas and imagine a landscape, she said. It’s another to look at a mound of clay and see a torso. There are the brains that want to invent, and the brains that want to reveal.

“Sometimes, I spend so much time alone that I start feeling like my identity is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite name it.”

Mitty wants to tell Lena that she feels that way about her entire life. That she’s spent so much time removed from others, with only her thoughts; that sometimes when she leaves the house, she has to remind herself of her personality; that the first few minutes of every interaction is simply an act of working out the kinks of being a human.

Whoever You Are, Honey quotes

Join the club