Point of View

The novel is narrated in the past tense by a third-person limited narrator focused on an unnamed female protagonist. The protagonist character is based on the author, Patricia Lockwood, a writer who has previously published two collections of poetry and one memoir and developed a large following on the social media account Twitter for her pithy and humorous posts. The novel's protagonist becomes famous after one of her posts—which reads “Can a dog be twins?” (13)—goes viral on the portal, which is the author's term for the internet. She is subsequently invited on a tour throughout Europe to speak on the subject of the portal.

The author uses the protagonist's experiences to offer commentary and insight about the internet and social media interactions in particular. In Part I, the protagonist is obsessed with the portal, incapable of locking her phone away for even a...