“When the internet is feasting on you, tearing the flesh from your bones like vultures descending on your corpse, you’re not meant to scream …” So says Ruby Williams at the beginning of The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done before embarking on an explanation of how the internet got to feast on her flesh.
Ruby, 27, has a “savant-like ability to predict what [a young, female, left-leaning] audience would care about, the kinds of headlines they’d click on, the posts they’d like … and share”. She is hired to manage an online publication for women, Bared.
It’s a stressful, 24/7 job. Screens on the office walls display Bared’s real-time analytics, ensuring all employees are subject to the constant drip of adrenaline and hyper-aware of the need to drive traffic to the site.
Ruby plans a series of articles about coercive control in intimate relationships, and as part of it publishes an interview with a woman whose abusive ex-partner had forced her to have an abortion. A rival journalist responds with a 1200-word article accusing her of pushing an anti-abortion agenda, calling her a “crumb-maiden of the patriarchy”. It seems an obvious misreading of Ruby’s carefully considered piece, but the internet doesn’t care. Pretty soon, Ruby is the subject of a brutal social media pile-on. Idiotic and bad-taste posts from her teenage years are unearthed. Former “friends” rush to add their two cents’ worth.
Her sister and boyfriend, both more grounded and less online, encourage her to put her phone away: “The world is way bigger than a few people on the internet and one shitty website.” But Ruby can’t stop scrolling; she’s accused of harming vulnerable women, of setting feminism back decades – the opposite of what she’d intended. She had very much enjoyed a number of early successes; she’d become the “youth” voice on TV panel shows, and her social media following had burgeoned. The limelight satisfied her desperate need to be liked: “Since I was in primary school, my approach to anyone who didn’t like me was to shower them with compliments and over-the-top generosity.”
Ruby’s desire for industrial levels of approval is, we learn in intermittent backstory chapters, a personality trait exacerbated by a tragedy that occurred when she was 13 and for which she feels responsible. Her neediness and guilt mean that, regardless of the support of those closest to her, she is particularly ill-equipped to handle the tsunami of internet hate that is heading her way.
Her story is a vivid, affecting illustration of what it might feel like to be the subject of hostility when online is where you live. Debut author Clare Stephens used to edit Mamamia, an Australian online publication that sounds a lot like Bared, and Ruby’s ever-increasing dread feels pulse-quickeningly real.
Reading the all-too-credible excerpts from the malicious texts, posts, comments and video rants that pop up on her phone becomes an increasingly queasy experience. So much so that the back stories of Ruby and another key character offer the reader welcome relief from what’s happening online, despite both back stories revealing tragedy.
The end of the novel comes with a hard-won resolution for Ruby’s troubles. Unsurprisingly, and without giving too much away, the way forward for her involves more real life and less internet.
There is a growing pile of novels that feature the perils of online life and the best ones help ensure we don’t become desensitised to how weird the internet is, how mean it can be and how stupid. This novel, with its insider insights, is a pacy and thought-provoking addition.
The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, by Clare Stephens (Atlantic, $36.99), is out now.
