Liza Monroy is joining us today to talk about her novel, The Distractions. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Mischa Osborn spends her days as a ProWatcher—keeping distracted people on task and lonely ones accompanied—from her Brooklyn Megabuilding, while eating PetriMeat Steax and working out with her favorite personal trainer, a straight-talking algorithm named Tory.
Her carefully constructed, isolated existence is suddenly upended by a chance realspace encounter with a HighlightReel celebrity, Nicolás Adán Luchano. On their first date, hiking in Kuulsuits and watching DroneBeez pollinate flowers, Mischa experiences a brief but intense realspace connection.
Mischa takes to relentlessly watching Nic onReel. As Mischa’s ReelWatching spirals into an all-consuming obsession, and even realspace stalking, Mischa takes increasingly desperate measures to be seen and valued, sucking others into her vortex of obsession until she completely loses control.
Meanwhile, someone is equally obsessed with Mischa, tracking her every move and perhaps even influencing her choices.
A tale of how technology enables obsession, envy, and unrelenting comparison, told through an eccentric cast of interconnected characters, The Distractions invites us to reflect on who we are watching, and why.
What’s Liza’s favorite bit?
When imagining the future world of my novel The Distractions, it came to me early in the process that future people would have long gotten tired of spending so much of their precious time staring at a screen. Depending on it to communicate, to share their lives and thoughts, to get their work done tapping on this tiny device that takes your eyes and attention away from the world around you.
My entire personality fits quite a bit into the “absent-minded professor” stereotype—living a life of the mind, I’ve always been prone to pitfalls such as walking into lamp posts. Add in the smartphone, though, 27 years into my now 45-year-old existence and I’m that irritating person who’s so busy in the Notes app jotting down an idea, texting, or having a lightning bolt of a thought of an image and caption I simply must post on Instagram right then and there, that I fall off the curb and nearly step into traffic, narrowly avoid a collision with a telephone pole, or inadvertently jostle the mailman.
I still remember how bizarre the iPhone looked when I first saw it at The Mall at Millenia in Orlando, where I was in town for a writing residency at the Jack Kerouac Project. I was dragged to the Apple store by a tech-geek friend who couldn’t wait to have this mysterious new device. I had never sent a text.
Eighteen years later, I spend so much time scrolling, heart-ing, uploading on social media, and even journaling and brainstorming via my phone, often while in transit by foot, resulting in tired eyes, anxiety, and clumsy feet.
I wondered, What if there were tiny, honey bee-sized drones that could take over from screens, projecting anything you needed to see on a surface while taking dictation and also recording your entire life?
These ultimate hands-free devices would be assistants, helpers, friends—powered by an algorithm that could do it all. Place your coffee order, compose a message to a colleague, and capture that wonderful moment from your day with your best friend and upload it to a highlight reel showcasing all your best moments. All you’d have to do is talk to them.
I called them eyelets. Tiny drones that follow you everywhere, serve your every need, and know everything about you. Everyone in the world of The Distractions has one.
Over the years I spent writing the book, I noticed more and more drones taking to the sky. I often see them up above the surf breaks where I take to the ocean to flee the trappings of tech addiction.
Real drones still appear large and clunky-looking and certainly don’t take dictation. I wonder, though, if the eyelet could ever be a realistic solution for the day we all take our addictive screen devices and throw them into the sea? That’s more imaginary than likely; still, every time my phone sends me my screen-time update and I’m shocked by the number, I do wish the next brilliant mind in tech would go and make one novelist’s fantasy a real-world convenience.
Creepy as the eyelets end up being in the novel, I love the concept. To me, they came to represent freedom. Freedom from being tethered to a screen. Freedom from walking into poles and off sidewalks. Freedom from scrolling!
In The Distractions, the eyelets illustrate a type of liberation from the technology that traps us, while ultimately becoming another type of trap created by our human desire for convenience and ease.
For now, I’ve committed to keeping my phone in my bag while walking. Or, at least, trying.
LINKS:
Book Link
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lizawarehouse
Twitter: https://x.com/lizamonroy
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizamonroy/
BIO:
Liza Monroy is the author of The Distractions and three previous books. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, O (Oprah Magazine), Poets & Writers, Marie Claire, Longreads, Newsweek, Guernica, Catamaran, Self, Psychology Today, Jezebel, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers, Bust and many other publications and anthologies, including both editions of The New York Times’ Best of Modern Love, Best American Food Writing, Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, Oprah’s Little Book of Calm and Comfort, One Big Happy Family, and Wedding Cake For Breakfast. Learn more here: https://www.lizamonroy.com/
