Synopses & Reviews
Everything I Need I Get From You will fascinate aficionados, but even for someone who's never so much as logged on, it makes a rich and heartfelt explainer on the feelings and phenomena that thrive on the internet. —Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing
A thrilling dive into the world of superfandom and the fangirls who shaped the social internet.
In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. "It's interesting for sure," Styles said later, adding, "a little niche, maybe." But what seemed niche to Styles was actually a signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternate universe: stan culture.
In Everything I Need I Get from You, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members' allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today. "Before most people were using the internet for anything," Tiffany writes, "fans were using it for everything."
With humor, empathy, and an insider's eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From alarming, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany's book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the internet forever.
Review
“Droll insights alongside expertly dissected tweets….Immensely entertaining....Tiffany remains archly self-aware throughout, assuming an alternately waggish and reverential tone that perfectly captures the absurd genius of this influential army of women.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
“Personal anecdotes elevate Tiffany's book into a heartfelt memoir….A finely balanced pop-culture investigation." Kirkus Reviews
Review
“How often the world forgets that the things of girls populate the intellect just as thickly and freely as the things of boys. Kaitlyn Tiffany's Everything I Need I Get From You is a brilliant demonstration of the joy, power, technological innovation and world-changing shifts that happen when girls turn on their love.” Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book
Review
“Just when I can't bear to read another thing about the boys who built or wrecked the Internet, Everything I Need I Get from You comes along. Kaitlyn Tiffany's book is a fresh and often funny experiment in finding forms fit to archive the websites where we became ourselves — and full, like them, of joy and awkward tenderness. As cultural history, it casts the most familiar developments in a new light. As criticism meets memoir meets performance art, it won me over like a great fan will — through sheer commitment to the bit.” Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love
Review
“Kaitlyn Tiffany's Everything I Need I Get From You is a headlong plunge into fandom, which, as she deftly illustrates, is the single force that drives today's Internet more than anything else. Tiffany shows that fandom isn't just about consumption: It's an all-consuming creative passion, a drive to remake culture for yourself. Tiffany is a sociologist of online niches as well as a brilliant recounter of the kind of obsessiveness that fandom thrives on, precisely because she knows the fervor herself. Everything I Need I Get From You is a perfect document of the peculiarly fruitful form of Internet-enabled obsession.” Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less
About the Author
Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology and culture. She was previously on the same beat at Vox's consumer vertical The Goods, after starting her career writing about pop culture, fandom, and online community at The Verge. Formerly the host of the popular podcast Why'd You Push That Button, which considered the tiny technology decisions that have an outsized effect on our modern social lives, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.