This is How You Remember it – Catherine Prasifka

Paperback. Canongate. 2024. New Condition. 

You’re nine when you get your first computer. Your favourite thing is a virtual pet website; you spend hours in the chatroom. You don’t understand why some of your online friends don’t use their real names.

It’s not long before you discover porn. You don’t know what you’re watching, but you do know that you shouldn’t tell anybody. Later, older, your first kiss is captured on camera and shared with everyone in your year. It feels like betrayal, but soon it feels normal. Part of the incessant cycle of posting, sharing and liking.

Now, you can’t remember a time when you didn’t feel hollow inside. Now, you know that something has to change.

Chilling, potent and intensely intimate, This is How You Remember It is at once a cautionary tale, a call to arms and a tender love story. It is about a life lived online, and about finding another way, when it’s all you’ve ever known.