A Love Story for the Digital Century
Melanie Gideon's latest looks at a relationship with the online world. Image courtesy Ballantine BooksAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Love letters are so old-school. No one picks up pen and paper anymore; everything’s revealed online. Melanie Gideon’s new novel, Wife 22, explores modern communication and the difference between life online and offline.
The novel kicks off when the heroine Alice Buckle is approaching her 20th anniversary with her husband, but things are off kilter — so she turns to Google, searching words like “midlife crisis” and “happy marriage.”
KUT’s Emily Donahue talked with Gideon about Alice’s attachment to the online world.
She’s definitely an addict. But I also think that is kind of the way we live life now, and I wanted to not write a straight, traditional narrative. I wanted to write in a way that reflected the way that we’re living. We’re reading a book, but our attention is constantly being pulled other directions, our phone is chiming announcing a text, Facebook updates are posting; so that’s very much the experience of reading the book; that’s very much the experience Alice has in her life. I really wanted to sort of create a fabric of 21st-century digital life.
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