We Are Watching Eliza Bright is an extraordinary, unputdownable novel that explores the dark recesses of the Internet and male rage, and the fragile line between the online world and real life. It’s a thrilling story of female resilience and survival, packed with a powerful feminist message.
We chat with debut author A.E. Osworth about We Are Watching Eliza Bright, writing, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Austen! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I publish under A.E. Osworth but yes, please call me Austen! I picked the name myself. I wrote WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT, which is loosely based on Gamergate, and it’s my first novel. I teach digital storytelling at The New School and I spend a lot of time thinking about community and the internet. I currently live in Portland, Oregon, with a growing collection of poisonous plants.
How is your 2021 going in comparison to that other year?
Oh really great, actually! My book got published, for one thing, I am fully vaccinated for another! And I managed to have a meet-cute during a pandemic, so I’m also dating this very adorable trans writer from Portland, Maine. Wrong Portland, but we can’t have everything we want!
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
First book: Duncan and Delores by Barbara Samuel; the one that made me want to become an author: that’s too hard, I’m picking a series and it’s the Tortall books by Tamora Pierce; the one that lives rent free in my head right now is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, because of the raging pandemic. I actually just talked about that one on a podcast called Queers at the End of the World, and that episode will be coming out soon!
When did you first discover your love for writing?
Like most things, this is nonlinear. I kept discovering and rediscovering it throughout my childhood—I wrote eleven pages of illustrated ghost story in second grade when the assignment was two pages, I just couldn’t stop. And then again, I wrote more than a hundred pages of a novel as a seventh grader (not bad for a tween!) and I shared with my close friends. And then finally, I took a creative writing class my senior year of undergrad and realized that this is what I wanted to do forever.
Your new novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Fast-paced cyber-thriller narrated by Reddit. (Yes, I cheated a bit with two hyphenates. But not technically! I followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it.)
What can readers expect?
Readers can expect a lot of traditional thriller elements combined with two collective, unreliable narrators. One is the men of a subreddit dedicated to watching Eliza and her co-workers, the other is a queer art commune that lives in a warehouse in Queens, New York. You can also expect a REALLY NERDY premise—some of this book takes place inside a superhero videogame! Other than that, I don’t necessarily want to tell readers what they can expect—see: thriller. I want everyone to enjoy the twists and turns.
Where did the inspiration for We Are Watching Eliza Bright come from?
Gamergate! I got really angry while I was occasionally covering and assigning coverage of that internet-shit-show at Autostraddle, where I was the Geekery Editor at the time. The inspiration for this book came from both the headlines and the sheer amount of rage I felt about them.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
The biggest challenge I faced while writing was not knowing if I could finish a book. And I deployed the “Dory from Finding Nemo” method of handling it. Just keep swimming! The thing about writing a book is that you write a little of it every day and, eventually, it will be done!
If it’s not too spoilery, was there a scene you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Less a scene and more a narrator! My favorite thing to work on in this book was the queer collective narrator, a commune called The Sixsterhood. Originally, they weren’t a narrator but my editor, Seema Mahanian, suggested that they should become one. We analysed how the Reddit narrator sounded and I made the opposite choices so that the Sixsterhood would sound drastically different; when I was done rewriting a section with their new voice, I looked at what I had and realized that I had reverse engineered a voice very similar to the one I use to text my friends! It really made me think about what I thought belonged in a novel, and why. Why wasn’t my first impulse to put the way me and my community sounded in the book? Thank goodness there’s writing on exactly that—Alexander Chee talked about it in his essay, “How to Unlearn Everything.” At least I don’t feel alone in backing into community representation!
Is there anything you hope readers will take away from We Are Watching Eliza Bright?
I want people to stop saying “in real life” when what they mean is “in physical space.” The internet, digital space, is part of our real life. Its consequences aren’t fake or separate. And I hope that changes how people interact with each other on the internet.
What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
Bumpy! And much like a thriller, with a lot of twists and turns. It’s potholed with rejection and I also would not change it for something else, not for one second. What I can say is that I have loved every second of working with my agent and the team at Grand Central (my publisher)—they’re spectacular and I hope I get to work with them and people just like them in the future! They’ve made the road far less bumpy than it was.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on two books right now, one about a coven of transgender witches fighting weaponized artificial intelligence (I trained a botnik keyboard to help me write the AI’s dialogue!), and the other about Satan. It’s rooted in Biblical scholarship and is a meditation on what it means to heal from unjust punishment.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
I’m reading both Ross Gay’s Book of Earthly Delights and Keisha Bush’s No Heaven for Good Boys right now and I can heartily recommend both!
