Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.
Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.
My Review
Just Watch Me is the kind of book that you finish in two sittings not because it’s a feel-good page turner, but because you absolutely cannot look away from the trainwreck you can see coming from a mile away. It is deeply, profoundly unsettling in the best possible way. Dell makes bad choice after bad choice, and watching her spiral is equal parts compelling and genuinely hard to sit with.
At the heart of it all is Dell’s grief over her comatose sister Daisy, and that grief is palpable on every single page. You can feel how much she loves her sister, and also how completely lost she is without her. Her decision to start a livestream and eat increasingly dangerous peppers for donations starts out almost darkly funny, but slowly reveals itself to be something much more troubling. It’s basically self-punishment in real time, and the book does not let you look away from that. The whole reading experience feels like anxiety slowly closing in, tighter and tighter, until you can barely breathe. You really feel Dell’s descent into a full mental health meltdown, and it is not comfortable. It is extremely well done.
That said! Dell is also genuinely pretty funny, especially in the way she interacts with her audience. She is mean to them and they love her for it, and those moments gave me some much needed air in an otherwise suffocating read. And as someone personally prone to stomach troubles, her constant consumption of Pepto and Tums had me laughing in recognition. This is a four star read for me, and a debut that absolutely lives up to the Fleabag comparisons.
THE GOOD:
- Absolutely unputdownable in the most stressful way possible
- Dell’s grief feels raw, real, and deeply sympathetic even when she isn’t
- The livestream format and seven chapter structure is really clever and effective
- Dell’s audience interactions are darkly funny and a great pressure release valve
- The spicy pepper escalation is both hilarious and genuinely disturbing once you understand what it means
- A razor sharp debut that earns its Fleabag comparisons
THE NOT-AS-GOOD:
- Dell is genuinely hard to root for, which makes for an uncomfortable read at times
- The anxiety of watching her spiral is a lot to sit with
THE NEUTRAL:
- This is a dark, uncomfortable book about grief, guilt, and self-destruction, so adjust your expectations accordingly
- If you struggle with content around self-harm or mental health crises, go in prepared
OVERALL RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Just Watch Me is a deeply unsettling, darkly funny trainwreck of a debut that you absolutely will not be able to put down, even when every instinct tells you to look away.
PERFECT FOR:
- Fans of Fleabag and darkly comedic character studies
- Readers who love a deeply flawed but compelling protagonist
- Anyone interested in stories about grief, guilt, and redemption
- Readers who enjoy internet culture as a narrative backdrop
- People who like their comedy to come with a side of existential dread
