Girl Airplane Mode: reading and reviewing Joanna Walsh's "Girl Online: A User Manual" on two flights from New York to Honolulu
And one layover in Seattle.
For a variety of mundane and unexciting reasons, I am an anxious traveller. Either I must close my eyes and attempt — pretend — to sleep, or I must be wholly absorbed in some other task: reading, writing, watching a film, total distraction. In this case films were not an option, so I spent the time with my trusty ereader and my collection of Verso ebooks, and picked something short and thematically appealing. Joanna Walsh’s book had been at the back of my mind for a while. I considered myself, after all, the archetypical Girl Online. (Who but the Girl Online would write a blog post in her notes app?)
It turns out that this book was made in a lab specifically to frustrate me, so of course I read the whole thing and began mentally formulating my review at the halfway mark. I know too much about computers and programming to connect with the extended metaphor that Walsh employs: being as I am a programmer (and, comorbidly, not disposed to metaphor in the first place) I could always tell when Walsh made a simplification or outright incorrect statement for the sake of the metaphor. I was predisposed to be unable to connect with the language of the book, the set of axioms upon which every thesis was built.
But there is a more fundamental disconnect. Walsh's second metaphor is Alice, of Wonderland fame, and — pardon my French — I fucking hate those books. I had to read them for year eight English; I've written before about the appeal of "randomness" in classic lit to the YouTube Poop Generation, so in theory this should've hit the spot, but I was the sole voice of dissent in a class of thirty teenage girls who were expected to delight in the weird and fantastical. My objection was to the arbitrary, forced nature of the book's random "humour" — obviously I did not find it funny — that it lacks the serious dedication to deconstruction of Absurdism, a mode that I would only later discover and fall in love with. I also hated the books because they fell in the tradition of what I think of as Punitive Literature, a particular template of a moral parable where characters — usually children — are routinely punished for their curiosity or ignorance. My father first pointed this out to me, actually, when I was very young and trying to put my finger on why I hated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Alice stepped easily into that tradition.
So, with my literary immune system rejecting the two structural metaphors of Girl Online, what was left? In the first part, I found myself wishing that the autobiographical aspect had been divested from all the stuff about Alice — there were interesting points being made about unpaid labour in typically female domains, such as housework, and there was a different rabbit hole I wished Walsh would chase, the intersection of unpaid women's labour with how the internet (and its portability) has changed the nature of work. As it is, this is only hinted at. It gradually becomes clear that this is not the focus of the book: the labour Walsh mainly writes about is writing itself, and the crowning glory is the central chapter, an extended thesis on blogging, chick lit, and girlhood.
The other Verso ebook I'm reading right now (#notsponcon) is a collection of Vivian Gornick's essays. Not only is she a joy to read for language's sake, but also, as a working adult with an endless appetite for knowledge but limited time on my hands, my favourite way to seem more well-read is by reading critical essays on books I haven't read, historical figures I'm not familiar with. Walsh similarly draws from a range of thinkers and theory that I haven't read (so of course, when she mentioned my guy [haha] Debord, I did the equivalent of pointing at the TV and yelling "I've seen this guy in something before!") — which made the omission of writers I'm familiar with even more glaring. It seems almost sacrilegious to me to write about the construction of girlhood and mainstream confessional literature without once mentioning Eve Babitz.
The only point in Girl Online where I found the structural metaphors truly satisfying was when they merged: as I'd been hoping, Walsh introduces us to the Alice of RSA cryptography. In the classic example, Alice and Bob are trying to send one another encoded messages, under threat of eavesdropping by a bad actor aptly named Eve. Walsh writes that Eve is ambiguously gendered in the example: neither the secretary (Alice) or the boss (Bob) — though these outmoded roles were never referenced when I took a cryptography class at uni — Eve is granted neutrality, the silent voyeur. I don't think it's true that Eve is ungendered, nor do I think this statement serves Walsh's point. I have always understood cryptographic Eve as gendered, because eavesdropping is such a fundamentally Girl Thing. Even beyond the paradigm of gossip and rumour, women frequently get forced into the role of the Good Listener — I know I've been her. It creates a feedback loop: you get so good at listening that you need to listen to everything, know as much as possible.
I think I've written before, though I can't double-check on airplane mode, about how Eve Babitz's writing resonated with me — her family background and her fearlessness of naming ugly emotions — and another point of connection, if I can flatter myself, is her skill as an observer, and to balance that out, let me also name our shared fault, a dedication to being nosy. She wasn't the only one. Before girls online were making bank off book deals from their autobiographical blogs, there were the journalist-novelists, and yet Joan Didion is relegated to a sentence in a later chapter about narrative structure. It seems remiss to write about the commodification of private life without touching on the media landscape before the internet encouraged everyone to become a public-facing diarist.
Walsh asks, "Is the blog the essay form... for girls?" This strikes me as both a stunning insight and a shocking oversight. Walsh's conception of girlhood as a diffuse stage of womanhood, a complex fusion of stalled growth and maturity, is compelling: "the girl is most girl [...] at the exact moment it seems logically impossible." But this is also territory that Didion was covering in the 60s — of course not explicitly in those terms, but she certainly commandeered the essay form to document her own faltering growth. Gornick shows us this too in writing about her own development as an essayist, and certainly it's what I'm trying to do on this blog. The essay has always been the essay form for girls.
But simultaneously, Walsh's thesis rings true for the Web 1.0 and early 2.0 blogosphere, which was largely populated by girls doing what girls do best: talking to each other. Walsh acknowledges that this confessional dialogue is a fundamental part of girlhood, and that's true for another part of the internet that she doesn't really seem to understand. The past decade has seen the emergence of "girlblogging" on Tumblr — not in the sense that Walsh uses the same term (she hyphenates it, which suggests she's unaware of the homonym) to mean autobiographical blogging about girlhood, but referring to a sort of communal scrapbooking. At the risk of over-explaining something which really ought to remain niche and ephemeral, one of the earliest formats of girlblogging is the web-weaving post, a collection of quotes and sometimes images on the same theme. Web-weaving exists as a kind of knowingly ironic dialectic: at the same time serious literary analysis and a silly post on a B-list social media website.
At the core of this book, Walsh is girlblogging. She has written a book that is both ironically meme-savvy and deadly serious, weaving together themes and references that she finds resonant, drawing on quotes and images from a wide range of sources. And she has done it all about "girl-blogging" itself, which makes it all the more fascinating that this entire internet community devoted to girlhood has passed her by like 90% of an iceberg, per the meme. The Tumblr reclamation of girlhood is often fraught — it veers all too frequently into gender essentialism — but there is also a parallel folk tradition earnestly devoted to storytelling and comparative analysis, which has been percolating in one form or another for about a decade now.
I guess, as with the programming metaphor, this is also a case of me knowing too much. Walsh has a lot of interest to say, but the way she says it is so disconnected from my own experience of being a Girl Online that I couldn't ever fully buy in. I could barely even parse the purpose of her concluding User Manual. That's not to say the book has no value though — the sheer scale of the differences in our experiences made me appreciate it more. For better or worse, the internet has to an extent normalised eavesdropping on other people's lives, and it was fun to do it the old-fashioned way: by reading a book. I can't relate to Walsh's experience of being an Alice, but she did remind me that I’m an Eve.
I am currently going through my back catalog and putting an image at the end of each post. Substack doesn’t give you the option to have a text-only homepage, and every single layout is designed to force you to use images for headers; it looks hideous and derelict without them. Very well, I’ll play ball. I hope you like colours.