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Alexandra Naughton reviews Stephanie Valente's INTERNET GIRLFRIEND.
Transient relationships, burned into our memories like Limewire-downloaded playlists on polycarbonate plastic discs.
Temporary and only known online.
Growing up on the web, an unreal landscape where almost everyone is pretending. No fact checks or reverse image searches.
Before social media, before profile pics, all we had was a/s/l.
I first read Internet Girlfriend by Stephanie Valente at the start of summer 2022, and I’m still thinking about it in summer 2024. There’s no specific connection between the internet and summertime, but in my mind, the two are inextricably linked. Maybe it’s because I’ve always seemed to spend a huge chunk of my summer vacation online. When it’s too hot to go outside, there’s always the internet.
Before going into seventh grade, I would sit in my friend’s computer room at her house and use AOL to meet people in chatrooms. Much like the elementary school summer nights spent on a friend’s living room floor in front of the TV playing Dr. Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, I had to strategically plan playdates and sleepovers to chase my vices. My parents didn’t want me chatting with strangers on AOL’s simply designed, novice-friendly platform, which, looking back now at the colorful interface and bold icons, seems like it must have been built for kids to use. At home we had Netscape Navigator, and we were only supposed to use it for research or with supervision. So if I wanted to read and contribute to a live stream of “Yo Mama” jokes, I had to do it outside the home.
Now, as an adult, as a parent, I get the prevention tactics. I get the fear. I am terrified of the bad things that could happen once my daughter is old enough to use a computer and browse the web, terrified of all of the creeps and weirdos who lurk and prey on sites and servers where kids are known to go. I want to shelter her from predators, but I also want to give her the tools she will need to protect herself, the trust to make choices that feel good to her, and the assurance that she can always come to me for help. To give her the freedom I didn’t have, so she doesn’t need to resort to surreptitious computer playdates.
That brings us to Internet Girlfriend—a poetic narrative depicting a coming of age in the bygone era of the early internet, a precarious and fleeting world of dialup and late night text-based intimacies. True to the time period, Valente employs the syntax and style of late 90s/early 2000s pop culture to recreate that ephemeral world: homemade mixtapes, Spice Girls, and magic eight balls, defining relics of a generation reared on spectral exploration, slumber party love, and crushes galore.
is pop culture a spell or a bad omen
—“clear lip gloss”
When I was 19, sitting in the quiet of my room and listening to my music for longing to (favorites included Franz Ferdinand’s “Dark of the Matinee” and Bright Eyes’ “The Calendar Hung Itself”) and wanting to just be in love, with anyone really, I carried out my fair share of online flings.
Meeting people online and idealizing the shit out of them became kind of my thing, and stayed my thing pretty much up until I quit drinking as a 30-year-old woman. When I started feeling more like an adult, the allure of unrequited and unrealistic love affairs became less exciting. It took a while though, and still some of my fondest relationship memories were the ones that played out through emails and text messages, without ever resulting in an IRL meetup.
i fell in love with a computer monitor. it was like sneaking out at night, but i’m just in the living room. wondering who you are and if you like to drink coffee.
—“first crush”
And what could be more romantic than a forever honeymoon stage? Getting to know someone with all that they’ve told you and filling in all the blanks with your own narrative, casting them as a character in your story with all of the perfect circumstances only fiction can provide. Imagining their smell, their smile, what their hands would look like on your body, before ruining any of that idealization by bringing it into the physical realm. I learned through practice that mixing url with irl often ends in disappointment. Some daydreams are better left in the mind’s eye. They’re more magical that way.
this is how i feel: endless
you :), and me :)
i keep your instant messages
like sacred charms,
i reread IMs
in the dark
in truth,
your messages
are spells cast on me
—“internet girlfriend”
I’m not sure what it’s like for young people today, for those who are currently finding and broadcasting themselves on social media, but they must feel a similar sense of brooding as millennials did when we were pouring our souls into Livejournals and Xangas, looking for our twin flames on Friendster and Myspace. I mean, right? Because there are just so many more avenues for being online now, and everything happens more instantaneously, will they arrive at the same level of exhaustion as we have at the same pace? Or will their electronic collapse come quicker?
That feeling of emotional exhaustion and indifference is increasingly spotlighted throughout the collection, as if we’re growing up with the speaker with every page turn. We get to a point where our internet girlfriend is already over it. She’s sleeping with a nameless man she could care less about while fantasizing about the soft hands of a specific femme.
Aside from the overarching detachment and screen fatigue, there is something triumphant and hopeful that develops within the text. Internet Girlfriend’s final poem, “palmistry,” flits back and forth between a pep talk and a warning, though by the end we can intuit that ultimately good changes are coming.
in the future, you’ll be crushed when she ghosts you
in the future, you’ll laugh at men and worry about getting killed
in the future, you think about jumping out of a window too often
in the future, you think about throwing your phone out of a window
for no reason
in the future, it bothers you more and more
in the future, you’ll learn to love yourself and it feels strange
—“palmistry”
Internet Girlfriend is a person who crawled all through the web and made it out alive. She is mature. She is scared. She is brave. She is forever sexting. She trusts herself and makes choices that feel good to her. She is full of secrets. She makes eye contact with herself on the cam and promises that one day she will learn how to love herself. She is all of us who existed and persisted through the Y2K era. She’s our best friend, always answering yes when we text u there? She is our internet girlfriend.
