JUST WATCH ME

Just Watch Me is the perfect mix between Fleabag and Big Swiss. It's a visceral, darkly hilarious, and surprisingly moving debut novel about a charismatic misfit who livestreams herself for seven straight days to raise money for her comatose sister's life support

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet). She’s being plagued by perpetual, spiking 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 plant propagations to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise $14,000 for a week of private life support for Daisy. In the dungeon of her stream, Dell is in control. Banishing those who don’t abide by her terms of engagement and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. On a dare, she discovers that she has a talent for eating spicy food. And her streaming fame explodes as her pepper consumption graduates from jalapeño to habanero to ghost.

Finally, Dell is good at something. But as her behavior becomes riskier and riskier and a troll-turned-incel threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores. And what real redemption means.

Just Watch Me is narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream. It careens us through a nonstop week in the life of this charismatic misfit with a heart of gold.

Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is an incisive, zippy tragicomedy about the internet economy. But it's also a moving meditation on love, loss, and forgiveness.

Just Watch Me - Lior Torenberg - 9781398551855 (Hardback)