Listeners, I’ve told all my friends about Harriet Gibsone’s debut book, Is This Okay? One Women’s Search for Connection Online, so it’s only right I tell you about it too. Is this okay? Pah, it is, by some distance, the best book I’ve read so far this year.

Harriet’s career as a music journalist took place at a similar time to the years I spent in the thick of it, and by the time she ended up at The Guardian – after a sterling shift at the ever missed The Fly - I was a fan, and had come to hold her as an ideal for everything I would like to achieve in British music media. Which is why, upon reading Harriet’s book, I was astonished to hear she had experienced the neurosis, the obsession, the jealousy, and insecurity, that I have felt for so much of my career. 

Okay, so I’ve never fantasized at length about Coldplay’s Chris Martin, but I finished Harriet’s very funny, very emotional book feeling much less alone than I had done going in. A treatise on noughties indie and the oddity of a parasocial digital life, I can’t recommend her book highly enough. 

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