I was 19 and in the market for a new idol when I first saw Alexa Chung.’ Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images for Marks and Spencer For the next few months, she is my secret guru. This steady, nurturing approach is essential for the baby’s growth, but it’s unfamiliar to me. After many years of using food as some form of punishment, restricting it, removing it from my body, and having little faith in my ability to look after myself, or that my body even works in the way it should, I am depending on Ella to teach us both how to survive. And so begins a dual journey: my quest to get pregnant, and my battle against the demon hormones’: Harriet Gibsone with her son. Photograph: Kate Peters/The Guardian I’m a bit unsure on my thoughts for this one. I did enjoy reading it, and despite being that bit younger, I found it quite relatable in a way that I think most people, in their thirties and under, will - we’re so very easily drawn in to our phones, and we so easily make assumptions on other people based on what they have posted online. However the author tends to take that to the extreme, feverishly looking over partners ex-girlfriends digital footprints, hyperfixating on a fellow commuter (while struggling with personal issues), developing para-social relationships with influencers, and hearing Alexa Chung as the disparaging voice in her head.

Terribly,” I reply. I refuse the drugs, leave the appointment promising to meditate and exercise, and decide to take matters into my own hands. I've seldom seen such extreme soul-bearing and admission of dysfunctional behaviour. It's a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash. despite being the former title holder of 'fittest girl in year 11' (huge slay), harriet is as insecure as the rest of us. throughout her journey into womanhood, she is increasingly drawn to comparing her appearance, behaviour and life with that of people she stalks online, be it alexa chung, her ex boyfriend's ex, her therapist's girlfriend, or mumfluencers with dreamy birth stories and notoriously unattainable daily routines. Then, at 31, she started to experience symptoms she couldn’t make sense of: forgetfulness, mysterious mood swings and bouts of weeping, and being woken in the night by sudden hot flushes. The sudden bursts of aggression made her feel like Piers Morgan. Her world was crumbling – but nobody could tell her exactly what was wrong.This is a very brave book to have written. Like an alcoholic writing of their worst indulgences or a drug user telling us about their most shameful lows, she tells us about her obsessive behaviour and online stalking of partners and people she fancied. I can imagine there are a few dozen people who will feel very uncomfortable when they find out how much time she was spending bouncing around the internet trying to find out everything about them. We're looking forward to welcoming Harriet Gibsone to the bookshop for an event to celebrate her upcoming memoir, Is This OK? This painfully hilarious book follows the author as she navigates the internet in search of connection. Harriet will be in conversation with fellow writer Anahit Behrooz.

My baby,” I cry, as he is raised from between my legs and immediately moved on to a table. The doctors huddle around his body. Mark is devastated. The baby is unresponsive, blue and limp. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” I tell Mark. I am as high as a kite from the epidural, but I am certain, from the depths of my soul, that he will survive. Mark puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s OK,” I smile. In this book, Czerski looks at both the physical properties of the ocean and the way they have influenced animal and human life. In lucid chapters she discusses such phenomena as the water walls and strata that sit deep beneath the surface, how different regions of ocean breathe carbon dioxide in and out; a marine ecosystem that is based on organisms so small 61 per cent are invisible to the human eye; and the societies – from Iceland to Polynesia – that have found different ways to live with and from the seas. This engine, she shows, is extraordinarily complex and we don’t understand exactly how it works. Just read this from its giggly heights to its mortifying depths . . . I feel like I've been through something. Something really worth going through. -- Frank Cottrell-Boyce After an extremely traumatic birth in which every step is aided by a penetrative arm or metal instrument, cranking my insides open, willing him to leave me, my baby is brought out limp and lifeless and resuscitated before I haemorrhage and am sent to surgery with tears. The golden hour doesn’t happen, the milk doesn’t come, no meditation would have curbed the violence of the events in the hospital ward. There is melancholy, too, in the gaps between how people feel and how they act. Seamus’s interior critiques of contemporary poetry are perceptive, but in seminars he is petulant. Fyodor, one of the non-students, has beautiful thoughts but doesn’t know how to express them and lapses into silence. Fatima has to work to support herself, which alienates her fellow dancers, more or less oblivious to their privilege, and she never really manages to make her friends understand. Despite the characters’ frequent self-absorption, the novel’s mood is one of tenderness and yearning.Ella speaks a lot on social media and on her podcasts about the benefits of hypnobirthing: a method of pain management that involves mindful breathing and visualisations, and a woman I work with claims her baby slipped out like a bar of soap thanks to breathwork alone. I Google local classes and sign up for the nearest session. Three eggs sounds OK, but every day the numbers will diminish; ideally we’d wait until day six, when we’ll have the strongest possible embryo to do the transfer. It’ll be remarkable if any stay alive that long. I keep the sober exchange a secret so as not to lower the mood over lunch. I'm glad I don't know her - or perhaps I'm more glad I was never the ex-girlfriend of somebody she was obsessed with - but I found the book to be oddly endearing, the deeper I got into it. Persistently funny, ill-advisedly honest and deadly accurate . . . My mind is blown -- Caitlin Moran, author of More Than a Woman