Olivia Gatwood Looks into the Void

By Ariél M. Martinez on July 12, 2024

Whoever You Are, Honey, the debut novel from poet Oliva Gatwood, is a literary page-turner exploring questions of technology, gender, obedience and intimacies amongst women. A beautiful couple moves next door to an odd, intergenerational pair of roommates on the beach in Santa Cruz. Mitty, a young queer woman, begins to wonder what exactly is askew with her beautiful new neighbor, Lena, after noticing a few things that don't seem quite . . . human. Whoever You Are, Honey is The Stepford Wives for the internet era but asks more nuanced questions through a deeply feminist lens and is told in the spellbindingly beautiful language of a poet.

I chatted with Olivia Gatwood by phone about gender and technology, the loss of beauty, intuition, and what about the internet she wishes would go away.

Ariél M. Martinez

Tell me how the book came about.

Olivia Gatwood

I started writing the book when I was living in Santa Cruz. My mom was born and raised there so I grew up hearing stories about Santa Cruz and I was very aware of its mythology as a city: how Santa Cruz was a city at war with itself. When she was growing up that meant it was a small sleepy beachside town, very working class, a lot of agriculture, until the world of academia came through UC Santa Cruz, which really changed the community and the town. Essentially it brought some form of gentrification. When I was living there, I saw the Santa Cruz locals resisting the influx of tech and the ways that was changing the town, mostly through wealth. I was working in a community of men in tech, which wasn't a social environment I had ever spent any time with. I was meeting men whose jobs were to kind of play god and was seeing the women they were choosing to date and how their relationship to obedience and perfection and efficiency translated to how they saw or what they expected of their partners. I started to think a lot about the world of AI and fembots. The canon of fembots is about the relationship between the man who created the robot and is usually about her becoming human and the man having to reckon with that. I wanted to recreate that story but about two women. What does it mean for a woman to interact with a fembot? What kinds of things would she see, how would she interact with her? It ended up being a story that was more about humanity and was a lot more existential than I went into it with.

Ariél M. Martinez

There's a sense of intuition guiding many of the women in your book. How did you think about intuition shaping your characters' choices, even when a character in the book isn't technically alive?

Olivia Gatwood

Intuition is a very feminine experience and women are very guided by intuition for a lot of reasons that mostly come back to safety. We can't always protect ourselves in the midst of violence so it's about avoiding violence from the jump. When I started writing, there was a version where Lena knew what she was but it was the reader who wasn't totally aware. There ended up feeling like there was a wall of Lena keeping a secret from the reader but I liked the experience of Lena having the same questions as the reader. Operating with that sense of confusion and being guided by what feels like intuition is a very human part of her. In the canon of AI stories, that is often when we see an AI transition into a more human consciousness, is when intuition, curiosity and questioning come into play.

Ariél M. Martinez

One of the most chilling scenes is when Mitty snoops around Lena's bathroom and finds no products. My own bathroom is a disaster with so many products but the ideal woman just looks like that and doesn't need them. How did maintenance and femininity factor into your conception of Lena?

Olivia Gatwood

At its most advanced, tech gives the illusion of really sleek minimalism and there being nothing there. Something that I observed from being in a world of men in tech was even their spaces were remarkably clean and there seemed to be very little going on. Or there was a lot going on but in the form of a machine where you couldn't see it. My bathroom is also a disaster with so many products and most of these products are bought because there's something about myself that I want to change—be smoother or bigger or softer or shinier or whatever. Any woman that presents herself as if she doesn't use any of those things is usually upholding an illusion. There's plastic surgery done in a way that you can't see it or a natural makeup look. But an AI woman wouldn't have any of those things because she doesn't have a human body. . . . She doesn't have any of the things we're trying to get rid of or enhance. It almost seemed like an inside joke that women have and would get if they read it. How frustrating would it be to go into the bathroom of the most beautiful woman you've ever met and realize that she was just born with it?

Ariél M. Martinez

Lena's beauty is something that's illustrated again and again. What is a beautiful woman to you?

Olivia Gatwood

I have always been really investigative of my own gaze. As a queer woman who is femme and has existed in both relationships of desire and relationships of competition with other women, I think there have been times where my relationship to beauty was colored by a male gaze in terms of what I wanted to be and what I wanted to be with. But when I look at women in my life and find them the most beautiful is—and this sounds so painfully cliché—but it's when they are the most human. Bodies when they are being bodies are really beautiful and what I mean by that is existing without the perception of being looked at. I think I'm most able to see beauty when I'm not consumed by competition.

Ariél M. Martinez

Something that you also explore is the idea of a ruined woman. Can you talk about that being a motif in the book and how it factors into questions about success and failure and femininity and womanhood?

Olivia Gatwood

I tried to make everything in some way analogous to technology. Even if that comparison was in total opposition to technology. I was interested in the idea that to maintain beauty and desirability you have to keep improving, almost like planned obsolescence. The idea that the only thing about you is the newest thing. Beauty doesn't increase the longer you have it, beauty increases the longer you maintain it. So I wanted to show how all of these women were grappling with the impending loss of beauty and what that looked like depending on what world they were occupying.

Ariél M. Martinez

"The impending loss of beauty" is such a gutting phrase.

Olivia Gatwood

It's not a loss of beauty, it's a loss of our perception of beauty, our feeling of being beautiful.

Ariél M. Martinez

How do you think that gender and technology are interwoven?

Olivia Gatwood

I think a very obvious example is that the more our references of beauty are altered by technology, the more our standards of beauty become totally unreachable because they're just not real. Perhaps an over-talked example is facetune. . . . Our sense of beauty is being dictated by something that's literally not real and has been altered by an app or a program that creates this cyclical and unhealable insecurity amongst women and sense of lacking in value amongst women. If we look at at-home assistants like Siri or Alexa, it's not a coincidence that these are women's voices and women's names. We're most comfortable when the people in service to us are women. Ironically, those programs are these all-knowing machines, which you'd think would be attributed to men but the nature of them is that they're helpers.

Ariél M. Martinez

How do you think the internet is affecting us and what do you wish it was doing?

Olivia Gatwood

One thing that was interesting when I was writing this book is that I've always had an aversion to having technology in books, specifically phones. It was articulated in a way I understood when the author Emma Cline discussed how the protagonist in The Guest's phone dies and that's why the story was allowed to happen. She talked about how phones remove mystery by removing the ability to not know something. Not only do we not have any mystery now . . . there's nothing we don't know. We're really uncomfortable with not knowing but we also know too much. I'm really concerned with how much we think we know and the amount of voices we take in every single day. I'm concerned about what that means for our ability to think critically for ourselves and have autonomous thought. I think when we lose that we turn to cultish extremism and really violent groupthink. Maybe what I wish for is the automatic and endless and infinite scroll of the algorithm to go away.

Ariél M. Martinez

Where did you find joy in writing this book?

Olivia Gatwood

I felt a lot of joy in watching this story transform almost without me. There were moments where I felt like I was stepping back and just watching these characters become. Those moments are brief and very psychedelic but that's really fun to have happen because it makes you feel like, okay this is a story I should tell because it's real.