A Note from the Author

Dear Reader,

There I was. A mom and a writer struggling to find my way into my next book, constantly distracted by both my young children and social media. But it wasn’t my kids, or social media, that was the problem. I was obsessed with other people, people who probably didn’t remember who I was but who I could watch online, who were leading lives that I, who’d then recently given up chasing big dreams for a quiet life in a quiet town, “coulda-shoulda” been living. More successful. More acclaimed. More adventurous. More fit. At the same time, I was obsessed by two ideas: that, if a relationship, friendship, or fleeting-but-maybe-meaningful connection ends, you can continue to follow that person’s threads online, watching their future unfold without you. The second idea was how following someone who might not even know who you are creates a false sense of closeness with that person.

Those are the notions that “trick” my protagonist, Mischa Osborn, into a false sense of closeness with a social media celebrity. With that, I began The Distractions. The setting grew into a world ten years in the making. It started with nothing but the title and something that happened to me. Something that happens to all of us and isn’t exciting or interesting in itself: I got ghosted. In an attempt to find out the reason (one should never attempt to find out the reason, but social media creates an opportunity that’s hard to resist), I went online and pieced together an entire story. But was that the story? What goes unseen in an age when everything is visible and privacy is an illusion? And if you are obsessively watching someone, is someone out there obsessively watching you?

In The Distractions, Mischa spends two years without leaving their building. As I was writing, I held strong to that part of the book, but I feared it was not believable and endlessly tried to figure out ways to make it something readers would be able to understand or relate to. Then along came the pandemic, and suddenly what formerly seemed inconceivable had become real-life. As I wrote and rewrote the book from 2012–2021, so many of the “farfetched” elements began to be mirrored in reality: clothing resembling space suits for “fire season,” environmental catastrophe, virtual personal trainers, careers going the automated route, mega high-rises, robotic personal assistants, productivity coaches who watch you online to make sure you stay on track, friends for hire, Augmented Reality, and the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence. I hope readers will fall into an uncanny world that is, at once, nothing and everything like our own.

Thank you for reading.

Liza Monroy