Just Watch Me
By Lior Torenberg
Avid Reader Press
Dell Danvers is crashing out. She walked out on her job, her sister is in the hospital in a coma, she has a perpetual stomach pain and rent for her bathroomless studio apartment/former walk-in closet is due. To make ends meet, she impulse started a week-long, 24-hour live streamathon to solicit donations.
At first it’s not going well. A viewer joins and leaves as soon as she says hi. No one else joins the livestream until she changes the title to “my sister is in a coma #lol.” The book, by Lior Torenberg, follows her for a week as she climbs the ranks of a Twitch-like streaming website called LiveCast.
“Fourteen thousand dollars to put my sister on private life support for a week,” she declares her goal to her small audience. “I’m not delusional, okay? Some families keep their loved ones around for decades. Obviously, that’s insane. But with Daisy, it’s barely been seven weeks– not even two months.”
The book is pretty realistic. Dell doesn’t become an overnight sensation. Her streams stay small, and people aren’t shelling out the big bucks. But when a viewer offers her $5 to eat a jalapeno on the stream, she discovers she has a knack for eating spicy food. Thingspick up from there. How much would they pay her to eat a habanero pepper? For the pledge of $10, she heads to Whole Foods to shoplift some.
Given her tenuous relationship with accountability it shouldn’t be surprising that Dell is hiding something. She’s dodgy when people are asking about her sister, and she’s unlikable a lot of the time. She minimizes her mistakes, ignores her mom’s attempts to reach out and is ruthless in blocking people who annoy her on her livestream. But the book takes a turn when her viewers start wanting to meet her in real life. She has less than 50 viewers when people start internet sleuthing to stalk her offline and trying to find ways to meet up with her one on one. Is this egregious behavior? Yes. Is it surprising? As a woman on the internet, I can confidently say no.
“Just Watch Me” is a fast and engaging read, not just because of the spectacle of watching someone try to make it but because of the questions it brings to center stage. Why do we live in a society where people have to try to raise money for life saving medical intervention from strangers online? What are the implications of the parasocial relationships formed through mediums like streaming? Could it be that people with audiences are paid so well because they’re giving up something we don’t even have ways to truly quantify yet?
Submitting yourself to be an object of everyone’s attention is kind of like eating really spicy food. If you put yourself out there, people will watch you if only to rubberneck at the spectacle of it all and you can derive a weird kind of pleasure from the challenge. Dell ends up bringing in more money on her livestream than she made at her minimum wage job in just a few days, but of course, this can’t be the whole story.
In the hands of a less talented writer, a book like “Just Watch Me” could have devolved into a moralistic lesson about the dangers of social media and the public gaze. Torenberg deftly weaves her exploration of the economy of attention through a coming-of-age story peppered with moments of levity and the absurdity of American life. The debut novel makes Torenberg a writer to watch.