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A Novel
by Lior Torenberg
Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She's behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she's being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.
Dell is her stream's dungeon master, banishing those who don't abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform's ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell's livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg's debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.
"A bewitching tragicomedy...Dell might have a tenuous hold on reality, but she's a captivating and endearing narrator. Readers will enjoy this wild ride." —Booklist (starred review)
"Torenberg raises interesting questions about loneliness in an age of mass exposure and how self-exploitation is the new American Dream...A unique subculture brought to life with taut prose and pacing." —Kirkus Reviews
"Readers will enjoy this wild ride." —Publishers Weekly
"Fans of Melissa Broder, Rufi Thorpe, and Ottessa Moshfegh will laugh, cringe, empathize, and be mesmerized by the spectacle of one woman's attempt to solve all her financial and emotional problems in the most adventurous, public, and high-stakes way possible. Just Watch Me is addictive and propulsive." —Emily Gould, author of Perfect Tunes
"Just Watch Me is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. A fascinating inquiry into digital performance and the complicated bonds of sisterhood. A riveting debut." —Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City
This information about Just Watch Me was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lior Torenberg's work has been published by One Story, MAYDAY, the Poetry Society of New York, and others. She received her MFA in creative writing from New York University and graduated from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Book Project. Just Watch Me is her first novel. Learn more at LiorTorenberg.com.
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