Now a novel unfolds on Facebook

I have a feeling that if Andy Warhol were alive he would be spending the summer writing a novel that takes place in real time on Facebook. In that spirit, Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser have been writing a clever serialised novel on Slate called My Darklyng. Their innovation: The plot unfolds not just in text but on Facebook and twitter.



For the purposes of what they affectionately call their "gonzo art project," the veteran young-adult novelists Mechling and Moser created a fake Facebook page for their main character, 16-year-old Natalie Pollock. What's fascinating is that Natalie's page may seem fake and stilted and artificial, but only in the way all teenagers' Facebook pages seem fake and stilted and artificial.

In My Darklyng's intriguing meta-commentary, there is a certain cross-pollination of what might be considered real life and fiction. Mechling and Moser hired a 15-year-old. Hannah Grosman, to be featured in photographs and videos for the character Natalie's Facebook page.

There are real people commenting on Natalie's page; Hannah uses one of photos from a photo shoot of herself as Natalie with another actress as the profile picture on her real Facebook page. A video of a kiss at the World Cup was posted on Natalie's page just minutes before one of Hannah's real friends posted the same thing.

So it is no longer art imitating life, or life imitating art, but the two merging so completely, so inexorably that it would be impossible to disentangle one from the other, rather elegantly making the point that these media, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, all this doodling in the ether, involve wholesale inventions of self, not projections.