Whoever You Are, Honey

This darkly brilliant debut novel explores how women shape themselves beneath the gaze of love, friendship, and the algorithm—“a fever dream for the AI age” (People).

“This book reads like a thriller, but it’s also a tender and searching exploration of what it means to inhabit a female body.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

Mitty can’t quite make out the expression on Lena’s face, but she doesn’t look distressed. She looks like nothing at all. She looks like the beginning, before thoughts, a white hallway with no doors, a room so long your voice disappears before it can echo.

On the Santa Cruz, California, waterfront, every house is a flawless glass monolith. Except for one. In a dilapidated bungalow, Mitty and her elderly roommate, Bethel, are the oddball pair who represent the last vestiges of a free-spirited town taken over by the tech elite. But their lives are about to be forever changed when a new couple, Sebastian and Lena, move in next door.

Sebastian is a renowned tech founder and Lena is his spellbindingly perfect girlfriend. But Lena has secrets; she feels uneasy about her oddly spotty memory and is growing increasingly wary of the way Sebastian controls their relationship. Mitty is also hiding something, and the way Lena appears to float through her luxurious life draws Mitty inexorably into her orbit. As the two women begin to form a close friendship, they are finally forced to face their pasts—and the urgent truths that could change everything.

Showcasing Olivia Gatwood’s talent as an essential author for our hyper-digital age, Whoever You Are, Honey is a gripping, seductive, and prescient novel that dissects relationships between women and examines how striving for perfection and desirability plays out in spaces where technology and power intersect.