Olivia Gatwood

What happens when what was once considered dystopia is now reality? This darkly brilliant debut novel explores how women shape themselves beneath the gaze of love, friendship, and the algorithm—“a fever dream for the AI age” (People). “This book reads like a thriller, but it's also a tender and searching exploration of what it means to inhabit a female body.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love A TIME AND VOGUE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Mitty can’t quite make out the expression on Lena’s face, but she doesn’t look distressed. She looks like nothing at all. She looks like the beginning, before thoughts, a white hallway with no doors, a room so long your voice disappears before it can echo. On the Santa Cruz, California, waterfront, every house is a flawless glass monolith. Except for one. In a dilapidated bungalow, Mitty and her elderly roommate, Bethel, are the oddball pair who represent the last vestiges of a free-spirited town taken over by the tech elite. But their lives are about to be forever changed when a new couple, Sebastian and Lena, move in next door. Sebastian is a renowned tech founder and Lena is his spellbindingly perfect girlfriend. But Lena has secrets; she feels uneasy about her oddly spotty memory and is growing increasingly wary of the way Sebastian controls their relationship. Mitty is also hiding something, and the way Lena appears to float through her luxurious life draws Mitty inexorably into her orbit. As the two women begin to form a close friendship, they are finally forced to face their pasts—and the urgent truths that could change everything. Showcasing Olivia Gatwood’s talent as an essential author for our hyper-digital age, Whoever You Are, Honey is a gripping, seductive, and prescient novel that dissects relationships between women and examines how striving for perfection and desirability plays out in spaces where technology and power intersect.

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.

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