Review by Joanna Kamouh, June 28, 2013

In her debut novel, Note to Self, Alina Simone guides readers through what may be the most earnest modern-bildungsroman they’ll come across for a while. As attested in her book of essays, You Must Go and Win, Simone is no stranger to the strange, and she sinks her main character, Anna, into similarly funny and agonizing situations, making readers wince the whole way through. At the start of the novel, Anna is 37, fired, and finally attempting to find herself. But Note to Self is not just the story of a witty Brooklynite fumbling her way through newfound unemployment and the pursuit of an artistic experience, it’s also a story about the peculiar way we choose to live every day. Using Anna’s self-diagnosed internet addiction; Simone questions whether being surrounded by technology has enhanced or inhibited our personal growth. Why is it that having so many options makes it so impossible to confidently choose one?  And most importantly, how do people behave in real life, again? Note to Self shows us what it looks like to find meaning in a world that has no spam filter.

Anna loves the Internet. She loves the (1) beside her Gmail inbox. She loves watching the number increase. Even spam emails are meaningful to Anna, because they’re validation that we’re a part of something. Who cares if you need 15% off at Target? The point is, you’re alive enough to get it. This bizarre, digital validation is the crux of the novel. It’s what Anna and so many of us have adapted as a meter for our self-worth, and maybe more dangerously, our sense of comfort. Simone writes, “Since leaving Pinter, Chinksi, and Harms, Anna had kept a solitary unread e-mail in her in-box. It sat there like a goldfish in its parenthetical bowl, keeping her from feeling lonely.” In such thoughtful, yet simple words, Simone explains how shallow the reassurance we get through technology is; how it allows us to keep moving, but doesn’t let us to go very far.

But the internet isn’t just where Anna wastes her time; it’s also where she goes to solve her crisis. After being fired, she spends her days aimlessly surfing the internet and comes across the work of underground documentary filmmaker, Paul Gilman. Gilman’s films are so simple – seriously, so simple – yet so full of life. Why had she never thought of it before? So Anna buys a camera and goes where any modern person would go to learn about art: Craigslist. This is where she meets Taj, an independent artist who’s working on a film that aims to get at the heart of average peoples’ dreams. Taj becomes a pioneer for meaning to Anna. He’s what she wants to be and who she wants to be wanted by. Over the course of the novel, Taj and Anna’s professional and romantic relationship becomes increasingly confused and deluded until she’s forced to confront herself – her true self – without the service of technology.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the novel is how effortlessly Simone’s writing illustrates our contemporary world and the way we’ve learned to function within it. She never seems to worry that dropping the name of a major celebrity or corporation might appear overt or forced on the page. Instead, she simply allows her characters to live their lives and their actions become as much of a statement as we need.  Here, Simone describes Anna in one of her many techno-dazes:

A tub of avocado dip and a bag of vegetable chips soon materialized at her elbow as she found herself opening a new tab and typing ‘Nicole Kidman plastic surgery’ into Google Images. But why, why? she wondered, compulsively clicking through JPEG after JPEG of Nicole’s endless butte of a forehead. For no apparent reason! Perhaps she was suffering from some kind of Internet Tourette’s syndrome that caused her to vomit noxious search terms into the ether with complete lack of impulse control?

The writing in Note to Self is informed with such remarkable, self-deprecating honesty that it’s often easy to forget we’re reading a work of fiction.

Though the storyline drags, and readers will spend most of the novel waiting for something to happen, it’s necessary to ask, what’s more true to life than that? Anna’s unsettling addiction to technology, her deep want to be wanted, to feel meaningful, all touch on something so universal, we never lose interest. As blindly made as Anna’s choices may seem, there’s something beautiful about feeling like you’re on the brink of something meaningful, about possibly becoming someone you’d be impressed by, and then, there’s something equally terrifying about following through with it. So whether or not Anna’s artistic voyage is a complete failure might not be the point. In Simone’s words, “living in hope is a beautiful thing. There was no better feeling. In fact, the feeling was even better than the doing.”