Can you maintain privacy while having an online presence? Can virtual relationships be substituted for real community? Why are we so drawn to watching pain? Lior Torenberg wrestles with these very existential, very current questions and more in her debut novel, Just Watch Me. 

Like many others operating within the $250 billion creator economy, Dell Danvers, Torenberg’s protagonist, has found a way (albeit a niche one) to make a living online. Burdened by chronic stomach pain, a rent payment she can’t afford, and a younger sister on expensive life support, Dell turns to a livestreaming platform to make money. After discovering she has an unusually high spice tolerance, Dell makes eating spicy foods the hook of her livestream, and as a result, quickly develops a rapt audience that has the potential to transform her financial reality. The cost of that transformation, though, is the question Torenberg is most concerned with. How much of yourself would you give up before logging off for good?

Released last week, the novel has arrived at a moment when we’re only beginning to interrogate the blurred lines between our real selves and the versions we portray online. As Torenberg writes, “The line between surveillance and communion is thin but strong; not a knife’s edge, but a discernible, navigable border.” Over the course of seven chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me brings readers to that border again and again, using humour and rapid pacing to make commentary on parasocial relationships and surveillance culture. 

Below, we spoke to the author about writing “internet speak”, the cost of living crisis, and more. 

First off, congrats on publishing your debut novel. Can you tell me about your journey to becoming a writer? Was this something you always knew you wanted to pursue?

Lior Torenberg: Yeah, definitely. I moved to America when I was three and didn’t speak English at home, so I really just started learning English when I was in school. I was in the ESL programme for a few years, and I really think of reading and writing as my way into the world – the way I could learn to communicate and understand people around me. 

I really became obsessed with reading and I won a poetry contest in second grade; I was the proudest person. I think that was the highlight of my career and I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. So, I do think that I’ve always wanted to be a writer and I’m lucky because I also think I feel compelled to do it. It’s an incredibly hard thing to do unless you feel a bit compulsive about it.

Though novels about the internet are now becoming plentiful, the plot of Just Watch Me – where the protagonist live-streams herself eating spicy food for money – is so specifically absurd and unique. Where did that idea come from?

Lior Torenberg: I started this book in 2021 and I was home a lot, watching a lot of TV and just taking in constant content, being way more online than usual. Then, I discovered Twitch, which I know has been around forever, but I wasn’t clued into it until then. 

99 per cent of Twitch is watching people play video games, but one per cent [of content] is in a category called ‘Just Chatting’, where it’s people at their computer, or folding their laundry, or making lunch, and they’re just chatting. I was so confused and intrigued by this – like, who are the people watching? But also, and maybe more interestingly, who are the people just live-streaming their day-to-day life?

The pepper aspect of it surprised me while I was writing it, but it is a subculture that I know a lot about. I am someone who loves hot peppers and hot sauce. I watch shows like Hot Ones and I go to the New York Hot Sauce Expo, where the climax of the book takes place, every year, so I was able to put that specificity in there.  

In real life, people are not responding directly to each other at any point; they’re just speaking parallel or perpendicular

So much of the text features conversations taking place in the online chatroom of Dell’s livestream. Though including ‘internet speak’ in fiction can easily feel quickly dated or gimmicky, you really nailed the choppy, stream-of-consciousness syntax of the internet. What was it like writing those sections and what were you using as source material?

Lior Torenberg: I did watch a ton of streams, mostly to observe the chat. I remember taking an English class in undergrad where the teacher had us go sit in a cafe and listen to how people talk to each other – as in, go eavesdrop on a table and write down their conversation. What you notice very quickly is that, even in real life, people are not responding directly to each other at any point; they’re just [speaking] parallel or perpendicular, and it’s all very loose.

Reading the stream chats, I was actually surprised that it followed a similar pattern, but with even more people not talking directly to each other. That randomness and those word associations were fun to write – things like typos or different ways that people emote. I dedicated an entire document to pulling out every individual viewer’s chats and making sure they have an allure and a consistency in the way they type, whether it’s all caps or whether they’re obsessed with the fact that they’re from Canada. It was also important to me to get to know all the stream viewers as characters. They’re not three-dimensional characters, but they are not flat either — they are always there. They operate like a Greek chorus to everything Dell is doing. 

Something else that stood out to me in the book was the way you write about Dell’s financial struggles. I think her plight – struggling to make ends meet in a major city – will feel familiar to a lot of young people. For example, there’s a particularly relatable scene in which she’s job hunting online, only to find that even retail positions have hundreds of applications. How did the current affordability crisis affect your writing process and that backdrop?

Lior Torenberg: I feel like writing about money in very specific terms is important. I wrote this book in 2021. At that time, I was in six-figure student debt. I’ve since paid it down and I’m really happy about that, but my monthly payment would’ve been close to a thousand dollars a month for, like, 30 years. That is just crippling; that is another rent. If you lose your job for some reason, or if you have any medical issue, that can quickly put you in a hole.

There was a time in my life when I had more of Dell’s mindset. She and I are super different, but when you are under duress in this way and have a loan over your head, it feels like you can’t live a normal life. There’s this constant battle of thinking about the price and doing mental math for everything you buy. I wanted to put that in Dell because I felt that way. Money becomes a very all-consuming thing when you have that type of debt. 

As for the book’s themes, I feel like this novel perfectly encapsulated the paradox that drives the loneliness epidemic: the internet provides us these endless means for connection, but it can also make people like Dell feel more isolated than ever. What about this tension interested you?

Lior Torenberg: There’s a quote by Donald Winnicott, and it’s something like, ‘It’s a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.’ I think that quote really encapsulates this dilemma. Dell, for example, is in a place in her life where she is in such strong denial. She can’t be alone with her thoughts for even one second. The people in her life that really know her, like her mom or her best friend, she’s avoiding at all costs because to face them is to confront herself; so, she has created this perfect world in her livestream where she can be seen only and exactly the way she wants to be seen. 

When you’re posting online, you are controlling what you say. Dell chooses what to share and what to withhold, and it’s just not real communion. Ultimately at the end, she has to finally face her real life and be seen for who she actually is. I think it is a really interesting theme; I don’t have an answer to this question, but I think about it a lot.

Denial is something that you have to work every second of every day to maintain, because if you let down your guard for even a second, the thing you’re trying to keep at bay is going to knock you over

Even though Dell’s followers begin to demand more and more of her, she tries to convince herself that she’s still the one in charge through this mantra she repeats throughout the book: ‘If anyone is going to exploit me, it’s me.’ Do you think this is naïve? Once you open yourself up to online consumption, do you think it’s possible to still remain in control?

Lior Torenberg: I think that if you’re doing your job right as a creator, your purpose under capitalism is to generate as much demand as possible. If Dell is doing her job right, her consumer’s appetite will be limitless and insatiable. The consumer will always want to have more access, more intimacy, more information. If you’re building that parasocial feeling on purpose, it’s part of what makes people donate and feel like they really know you.

Dell’s denial is such an active force. Understanding the mechanism of denial really broke open the book for me, because denial is not passive. Denial is something that you have to work every second of every day to maintain, because if you let down your guard for even a second, the thing you’re trying to keep at bay is going to knock you over. So, she needs to maintain control every second of her life so that she does not have to be alone with her thoughts. But no, I don’t think she can maintain it forever. 

The novel also does a great job of documenting the internet’s appetite for ‘trauma porn.’ In one line, Dell describes her followers as ‘animals drawn to the smell of death.’ Why do you think that misery performs so well online?

Lior Torenberg: I think this has been true for a while. We see it with longstanding shows like Survivor or Amazing Race, where the extremes of the human experience are shown for a salivating audience. But with the creator economy and specifically the rise of AI, the veneer of picture-perfect or airbrushed content — people don’t want it anymore. I think there’s a real desire for authenticity and vulnerability.

Even though a lot of people try to portray authenticity and vulnerability, it’s still very controlled. Real authenticity and vulnerability in the era of AI and mass content creation — what does it even look like? To me, what comes to mind is shows like Hot Ones, where even the most media-trained celebrities are just falling apart. And the reason they are losing it is because of pain. I think that pain and these extreme human emotions are almost the last frontier of authenticity available to us. When you’re pushed to that extreme, you can’t fake it anymore. 

Finally, what do you hope the audience will get out of the book?

Lior Torenberg: I love that you asked about money. I think we don’t talk about money enough. I don’t think we deal with digestion enough – I love books where people are eating gorgeous meals, but we don’t get the other end of that. I know that’s disgusting, but that’s real life and people have tummy aches.

Aside from the themes and motifs, I really genuinely hope that the book actually makes people laugh. I wrote it during the pandemic to entertain myself. If that translates even a little, then I will be delighted because it is all just entertainment. Whether you’re watching TV or reading books or watching streams, we all just tune into something in order to take our minds off the day-to-day. I don’t care if it’s ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’ – I want to entertain people.