Just Watch Me - by Lior Torenberg (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister--a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She's behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she's being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.

Dell is her stream's dungeon master, banishing those who don't abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform's ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something--but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.

Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell's livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg's debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.

Review Quotes

"Fans of Melissa Broder, Rufi Thorpe, and Ottessa Moshfegh will laugh, cringe, empathize, and be mesmerized by the spectacle of one woman's attempt to solve all her financial and emotional problems in the most adventurous, public, and high-stakes way possible. Just Watch Me is addictive and propulsive." --Emily Gould, author of Perfect Tunes

"Just Watch Me is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. A fascinating inquiry into digital performance and the complicated bonds of sisterhood. A riveting debut." --Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City

"Lior Torenberg's debut novel is a delicious treat, and the flavor is Carolina Reaper. I was entranced by the fire-hot, take-no-prisoners Dell as she led me through a hypnotizing world full of bad behavior and self-destruction. Torenberg tells this story as no one else can, with searing prose and impeccable comic timing. Just Watch Me lives up to its title--I dare you to look away," --Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger

"Lior Torenberg has her finger on the pulse of how dangerous and desperate it can be to live one's life online. Dell, her twenty-something protagonist, has a special flair for getting into lots of trouble. She'll make you laugh out loud and break your heart." --Helen Schulman, author of Lucky Dogs and Fools for Love

About the Author

Lior Torenberg's work has been published by One Story, MAYDAY, the Poetry Society of New York, and others. She received her MFA in creative writing from New York University and graduated from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Book Project. Just Watch Me is her first novel. Learn more at LiorTorenberg.com.