This review begins with a confession: I’m a lurker. I once found a website through which you can watch people’s Instagram stories without them knowing; multiple times a day, I typed in the name of the ex of the man I was seeing. I searched everything she posted – photos of food, selfies, songs – for hints about their relationship, which I hoped would tell me more about him. I knew it was unhinged but I couldn’t stop. Even after my relationship with the man ended, I continued to mindlessly look at his ex. I felt as though I knew her.
Ana, the late-20s protagonist of Australian writer Amy Taylor’s debut novel, does the same thing when, having fled to Melbourne from Perth after a bad breakup, she begins a relationship with Evan, a man she meets not on the apps but at a bar. She tries to savour the IRL-ness of it all – but, when Evan adds her on Facebook, she finds a photo of his ex, Emily, and discovers that the woman died a year earlier. Down the rabbit hole she goes, while pretending to Evan she knows nothing. He won’t talk about it, anyway.
Search History joins the crowded field of “extremely online” millennial novels, often by and about women. These books hinge on being relatable – whomst among us has not spent a night balled up on the couch with a cheap bottle of plonk, flattened by another bad date? Do any of us actually have unique experiences?
Ana is the typical white millennial woman: she works at a tech startup with a plant-filled office and communicates in gifs and memes. Like many people her age, she’s cynical and disaffected, which directly clashes with the Ted talk culture pummelled at her by friends and colleagues. (Looking at a motivational quote calendar on the office fridge, she thinks to herself: “I would begin to wonder if there was a dream of mine I’d left neglected somewhere, while I wasted my life performing the uninspiring task of being employed.”)
The world within Ana’s phone is just as real and vivid as the physical world around her – indeed, it’s where many of her key discoveries happen. The novel explores the gamification of relationships, as well as the way in which instant access to information about strangers has demystified the dating process. As Ana burrows more deeply into Emily’s life through her static, perfect feed, she is haunted – like the nameless narrator in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – by the past lover. Her imagination runs wild to fill in the gaps, and she shrinks in the shadow of a figure who becomes so twisted in her mind that it almost becomes a fiction. Her behaviour becomes erratic and unjustifiable – some parts are genuinely difficult to read.
The author employs smart stylistic choices – Ana’s ex, with whom she had an entire life, is never named, while Emily, a woman she never knew, is rendered in full colour. Evan is given very little personality or detail; we know that he’s some kind of finance bro and comes from a wealthy family, but other than that he could be anyone. Taylor zooms in on the singular obsessiveness that can overtake a dopamine-flooded brain in the early days of infatuation. Her writing is sharp and self-aware, standing in contrast to some of the more rudimentary novels in this field.
A concurrent thread throughout Search History hints at the dichotomy of desiring men while also fearing them; the dangers of being a woman in the world snakes through. In the novel’s first chapter, Ana goes on a date and has sex that teeters on the border of consent. A week later, she watches a stranger on the bus deliberate over how to word a rejection text message, and then watches as a reply appears, spiky with anger.
Ana is scared to go for walks alone at night. When she and Evan encounter a drunk woman at a party and a man claiming to be her boyfriend tries to take her home, Evan brushes off Ana’s concern. Passing interactions in her social groups embody the casual putdowns women receive from their male friends. Flashbacks to Ana’s adolescence show how early women are socialised to crave male approval, particularly sexually. It’s not just danger but inequality in general: a point about men being able to ask for a raise more easily makes its way in, too, but has no real relevance to the rest of the story.
These points do, at times, feel shoehorned, or at least sidelined by the central Emily plotline – and for readers of this genre, it may feel a little didactic; a little like preaching to the choir.
Still, Search History is a pacy, compulsive read that illustrates the double-edged sword of living in an information-rich world. By the end of it, I felt exhausted and embarrassed thinking back on my past behaviour but also somewhat comforted knowing that maybe this is just how it is for us now. I made a mental note to log off more often – but I know I won’t.
Search History by Amy Taylor is out now through Allen & Unwin
