In Olivia Gatwood’s debut novel, Whoever You Are, Honey, one of the first characters we encounter is the city of Santa Cruz, a beach town south of Silicon Valley, accessible via the semi-treacherous Highway 17, which slices through the shadowy, lugubrious Santa Cruz Mountains. Historically a zonked-out, goofy-on-purpose community of surf rats, gay rights, UC students, and stoner hedonism, Santa Cruz has now shed much of its weirdness as upmarket tech-industry professionals build glassy beachfront houses.
The Santa Cruz that Gatwood portrays has an atmosphere of dark, voyeuristic uneasiness reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith. The dread is palpable as we meet Mitty, twentysomething and working a dead-end restaurant job near the faux-ritzy waterfront village of Capitola. It’s a territory Gatwood describes with dead-on accuracy, invoking “drumming white transients with sad-eyed pit bulls,” “bowlegged skateboarders with toasted cheeks,” “the sandy row of sports bars adorned with signs made with Y2K clip art,” and even the “drunken bachelorette parties floating—sometimes capsizing—on inflatable rafts along Soquel Creek.”
“Beyond it all,” the author observes, “the ocean is black, except for the row of glittering cargo ships lined up against the horizon.”
Mitty is estranged from her mom in Arizona and remains traumatized by incidents from her childhood. For the past decade, she has lived with Bethel, a woman more than 50 years older who functions like a surrogate grandmother. The two of them live in the last janky old beach house that hasn’t been converted into a vacation rental for C-level executives or digital nomads.
At night, Mitty shuffles along the beach, staring into the new houses, horrified yet fascinated by the influx of the tech bros. From inside her own home, she watches the new neighbors having sex outdoors and indoors.
Eventually, we are introduced to those neighbors. First, there is Sebastian, a creepy engineer whose AI company created something—although we don’t know what—that led to a colleague being murdered in the mountains by his own interns. Conspiracy theories are rampant. People in town are saying the AI might have become sentient.
Then we meet Lena, Sebastian’s perfectly unreal girlfriend, who seems almost computer-generated herself. She can hardly remember anything of her life before she met Sebastian, to whom she refers in boilerplate language “like she’d lifted it straight from Sebastian’s resume.” Mitty finds Lena to be “unnatural like a poorly doctored photo…[her] age…almost deliberately inscrutable, as though calibrated so that a man could imagine her as anything.” Before long, Mitty becomes obsessed.
Gatwood made her name as a poet. And reading this novel, we can tell. If one phrase in a poem can open a window into another potential universe, then Whoever You Are, Honey operates in a similar way. Even at the sentence level, paragraphs become portals, luring us to jump through—or at least reread multiple times. The effect is a kind of suspended animation, in which we don’t know whether to feel spooked or sad or both. We want to wait around, to see whether this becomes a murder mystery or a friendship novel or a scathing satire of capitalism’s effect on women’s bodies.
Maybe it’s all of the above.
If AI and Silicon Valley are important threads here, Gatwood also piles on layers of additional meaning in ways that only a poet might accomplish, sculpting the relationships that make up this world.
Multiple themes emerge: Memory, aging, and nostalgia versus the ways that tech dehumanizes us. Voyeurism versus solitude. Beauty worship as little more than another devotion to borders. All of this is delightfully backdropped by the cold green shadows of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Gatwood is especially good at painting the idiosyncratic details of people’s lives. Bethel’s house has “graying wood shingles coming loose like hangnails”; a tuft of mushrooms grows from the ceiling “like shiitakes, with their rippling, fleshy sun hats.” A description of Mitty’s mother’s boyfriend is gorgeously Raymond Chandler–esque: “His face looks bottom-heavy, like a tube sock filled with pennies.”
And yet, even as Whoever You Are, Honey explores a matrix of relationship dynamics, it ultimately becomes about two people, Mitty and Lena, who are longing to reconnect with themselves. Both have lives that increasingly intrigue the other, a development that surprises both of them.
But there’s a difference: While Mitty is running from her past, Lena doesn’t know what hers is. Piece by piece, Gatwood reveals the character in eerie fashion, exploring her inability to know her qualities, her history. Lena laments that everyone else seems “to recall their lives with such chronological clarity,” even as she and Mitty come to inspire each other. They both need to be repaired. But how?
Gatwood brings a new voice and perspective to a culture dominated by tech gentrification. She condemns overgrown CEOs who dream of reinventing everything, including their own girlfriends. Think The Lost Boys, refracted through the lens of AI dystopia, a different sort of horror story for an artificial age.•
Gary Singh’s byline has appeared over 1,500 times, including on newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry, and short fiction. He is the author of three books, including The Unforgettable San Jose Earthquakes: Momentous Stories on and off the Field, published in 2024.
