What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with 'accounts' of personal 'experience'. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?

Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.

"Esoteric in one breath and widely relatable in another, threaded with sly humour and enlivened with breaths of personal reflection." - Irish Times

"In this profound and moving account of what it's like to be a girl online, Joanna Walsh guides readers through unwritten terms and conditions women face when they're on the internet, how they're forced to commodify themselves, and effectively pay for the space they take up 'with accounts of personal experience.'" - Business Insider

"In this book of essays in alternative forms, including programming language, tweets, and lyric prose, Joanna Walsh explores what it means to be a woman on this thing called the internet. Expect some philosophizing on tech, identity, selfies, and social media." - Nylon

"Joins a growing genre of writing, including fiction and nonfiction, that attempts to articulate the way it feels to be online." - 3:AM Magazine

"In a series of meditations and 'thought experiments' exploring motherhood, blogs, women's writing, and the meaning of work both on and off the screen, Walsh examines the relationship between looking and being looked at, watching and being watched, that is inherent to both the internet and femininity." - The Paris Review

"Any woman who's ever dealt with reply guys gone feral, dogpiling, doxxing, or dick pics in her DMs knows one thing: It's hard to be a woman on the internet. In Girl Online, Joanna Walsh explores our relationship to the web - what we sacrifice to have an internet presence, how our identities change online, and what we receive in return." - Bustle

"Walsh's philosophy is funny and thoughtful, and here, she presents the feminist resistance for the extremely online girls (or should we say gworls?)" - The Face

"An explorative work about what it is to be a woman, on and off the internet." - The Times

"Girl Online sits generously, generatively, generically in the questioning, querying, "wondering" modes of the writing it examines." - The Arts Desk

"A deeply playful romp through the theory and politics of creating an online persona and of logging on...[Walsh offers] a new understanding of how girlhood is performed online." - Lunate

"Walsh delivers playful and lived-in observations about the online world." - ArtReview

"Using a variety of styles ranging from programming language to tweets to a blog, [Walsh] brilliantly captures the realities and unrealities of online existence." - Manhattan Book Review

"In Girl Online, Walsh dissects a more quotidian experience of being an on-screen woman: that of being female and online, relying on the internet for work and for professional advancement, trying to figure out what kind of image to project for maximal success...Above all else, Girl Online and My Life as a Godard Movie ably, bravely explore yet another kind of split: that between theory and practice when it comes to female self-empowerment." - The New Republic

"Experimental on a formal level, mixing registers, styles and source material. Walsh splices life-writing with TV criticism, speculative vignettes, exegeses of algorithmic logic, reconsiderations of recent literary history and many quotations from other writers." - Times Literary Supplement