Online and off balance: a cautionary tale about our virtual lives

Lottie Moggach isn't on Facebook. The 36-year-old author left the social network when she began writing Kiss Me First, her gripping debut novel that asks just how well we know the people we talk to online.

“Leaving Facebook was definitely linked [to writing the book],” she says. “It was partly because I spent too much time on it, but also it was really making me unhappy, and I didn’t realise that until I came off it. It felt like taking off tight shoes. I’m just not very suited to it. I didn’t like volunteering information.”

Kiss Me First may inspire others to reconsider their online lives. The seed of the book was planted back in 2007, when a "freelance and underemployed" Moggach would find herself checking Facebook dozens of times a day.

“I saw all these details of people’s lives, and it occurred to me that there were people there, not close friends, that I could easily not see again in the flesh because there was no need to see them,” she says.

“I knew everything I could possibly want to know about their lives already. I realised that there was a danger of Facebook not enhancing real-life relationships but replacing them. The flesh and blood person may as well not exist. And that was the seed of the idea. I thought, if you paid someone to impersonate you, how long would it take before they were found out? And I thought, well, in some cases, actually, it would be quite a long time.”

Taking over an online life
The result is the story of Leila, an isolated young woman who receives an unusual request after she joins an online philosophy community. The site's founder, Adrian, asks her to take over the online life of a total stranger called Tess, a bipolar woman who has decided to take her own life and wants to "slip away from this world unnoticed . . . without causing pain to her family and friends".

First of all, Leila will talk to Tess via Skype and email, and find out as much about her life and friends as possible. Then after Tess’s death, Leila will pretend to be her on Facebook and in emails for a few months before gradually phasing out contact. They compare it to turning down a dimmer switch on someone’s life. But Leila inevitably gets too caught up in Tess’s real-life relationships, partly because she has never really had a social life of her own.

The book has been described as a psychological thriller, to Moggach’s surprise. However it is described, it is a compelling examination of how the web has affected our personal lives. Leila, who has spent her adult life caring for her ill mother, has only really experienced the world through a screen.

“I wanted to write about someone who’s basically been brought up by the internet,” says Moggach. “I think we don’t know what the internet is doing to our relationships yet because we’re still all in the middle of it. In Leila I was trying to imagine someone who didn’t know a life that was any different. I don’t want to be all doom and gloom about it, but it must do something to you as a child if you grew up with your virtual life being as important to you as your real one.”

Mother's footsteps
Having worked as a journalist since dropping out of college, Moggach always knew she wanted to write. Her mother is the acclaimed author and screenwriter Deborah Moggach who, her daughter says, "made it seem like a brilliant job. She loves writing – she's the opposite of the tortured artist. I realise now that she gave me a misleading impression of what it's like to be a writer."

She never really considered not following in her mother’s footsteps. “It’s a lack of imagination and lack of rebellion on my part. Real rebellion would have been to go and work in the City or something, but I don’t have that kind of aptitude.”

Moggach’s family influenced one aspect of her book: the question of self-determination. Although Moggach makes it very clear she doesn’t sympathise with or condone Leila’s desire to help Tess take her own life, she says: “in terms of people at the end of their lives choosing euthanasia, I’m strongly in favour of people having more control”. In 1985, her grandmother went to prison for murder after helping a terminally ill friend who was a member of the right-to-die group Exit. “She made the mistake of telling someone about it and she got put in prison. She was there for six months and never really talked about it. I knew she was in prison but I didn’t really know why – I just knew I didn’t get a birthday present.”

Moggach writes about these ideas in a complex and thought-provoking way, just as she writes about the possible downsides of online communication. She isn’t, however, totally against online friendships.

“I do think you can have real relationships online, as long as both parties are aware that everyone is putting their best side forward and it’s not the full picture,” she says. “We believe the version [another person puts] online is the true one – you forget they’re editing out stuff.”

Kiss Me First is published by Picador