Irate at another fussy customer at Juice Body, Dell Denvers walks out of her job, straight to her unaffordable Hell’s Kitchen studio.
A fan of watching internet streamers to relax, she’s moved by desperation to initiate a livestream of her own, called ” My sister is in a coma# LOL.” As traction builds on her stream, an idea forms: a week long streamathon to raise money for her sister, Daisy. Dell tells her audience her sister’s coma has been designated by the hospital as vegetative and will no longer cover life support; Dell has to find a way to raise $14,000 a week to provide Daisy with private care. Her cause captures an audience, but Dell has to deliver entertainment – of an increasingly extreme nature.
She begins by eating five habaneros (a chilli) with the painful experience described in magnificent agonising detail – and the donations pour in. A famous streamer, hot_pat_of_butter, joins in, and begins to mentor Dell, impressed with her growing audience and poignant story. But another viewer, Exelsior404, whose demands are obscene, begins harassing Dell in the real world, exposing her “lies.”
Dell’s popularity and bank account grow over the week of non-stop streaming, as her relationships with her mother and best friend evaporate. Dell becomes obsessively committed to satisfying her community of viewers, no matter the risk is.
Narrated in a taut seven chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, JUST WATCH ME coaster-rides us through a non-stop week in the life of this charismatic misfit with a heart of gold. Who doesn’t like voyeurism coupled with the visceral, while maintaining an audacious and courageous bearing?
Torenberg’s debut novel is both an incisive, zippy tragicomedy about the internet economy as well as a moving meditation on love, loss and forgiving. The author received her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and graduated from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s BOOK PROJECT. Her works have been published by One Story, MAYDAY, the Poetry Society of New York, and others. She brings a unique subculture to life with taut prose and pacing.
Torenberg raises interesting questions about loneliness in an age of mass exposure and how self-exploitation is the new America Dream. Dell’s nihilistic narrative chatter sometimes gets tiresome but there are also startling passages of description so absorbing we forgive her bad mood.
I dare the reader to not read the 288 pages in one sitting.
