Fembot Despair in Olivia Gatwood's 'Whoever You Are, Honey'

Poet and writer Olivia Gatwood probes the psychology of a fembot who realizes she was created by and for a man. Her first novel, Whoever You Are, Honey, follows a young woman, Mitty, as she connects with her new neighbor, Lena, a beautiful sentient AI woman who thinks she is human. Gatwood takes our anxieties about the threats and promises of artificial intelligence into giving her fembot agency and the relatable coming-of-age desire to figure out who she is and what her place is in the world.

As with Olivia Gatwood’s previous writing in her two poetry collections – 2017’s New American Best Friend and 2019’s Life of the Party – with Whoever You Are, Honey, she pays particular attention to identity, power, feminism, and the joys and pains of human connection. Though most of the chapters are untitled, occasionally, Gatwood brings a reader to “Before” when Mitty was a teenager living in Paradise Valley, cleaning up after and falling in love with a ballerina, and ultimately making a regrettable decision that would alter the trajectory of both of their lives.

Mitty, who keeps to herself primarily out of shame about this dark moment, develops a close friendship with Lena. They confide in one another about shameful and scary memories and thoughts they’ve been keeping private, discovering the relief of having a friend who can empathize. This bonding gives rise to Mitty’s feeling of freedom in “knowing she would no longer have to pretend her world is more abundant than it is – that she is less bewildered by life than she is – in front of a new person, and what they saw wouldn’t drive them away.”

In Santa Cruz, where many from tech wealth have retreated to ultra-contemporary glass homes, Mitty – a resident of one of the last remaining pre-gentrification homes – is a voyeur until Lena welcomes her in. Mitty lives with 79-year-old Bethel, a peculiar arrangement for a woman in her late 20s. The roommates’ possessions – the dusty objects they’ve accumulated over the years – enrich their identities to Lena, who cannot find evidence that she lives in her home with her boyfriend, Sebastian, amidst the open spaces and clean white walls.

Olivia Gatwood has built her writing career on making women feel seen. It’s exciting to read her clear reflections on love, identity, and power; she has a knack for expressing emotions honestly while challenging cultural norms. I first came across one of Gatwood’s slam poetry videos on YouTube in which she emphatically recites her poem “Alternate Universe in Which I am Unphased by the Men Who Do Not Love Me”.

After a string of heartaches, I was hooked on her poetry. I loved the idea in this poem of building a desk and writing a book at the desk instead of wasting time pining after “men who did not love me”. Her first poetry collection, New American Best Friend, includes this poem among others, such as those about coming of age inspired by poets like Marie Howe and indignant odes to “the Word Pussy” and her “Bitch Face”. In her second poetry collection, Life of the Party, Gatwood explores how women’s fears drive the morbid, booming true crime industry and the roles that racism and class play in who gets to be mourned.

With Olivia Gatwood’s interest in exploring the fascination that society, and often women, have with true crime in mind, it’s no surprise that the first time Mitty meets Sebastian, she tells horror stories around a campfire about serial killers native to Santa Cruz. She ends with a remark about a recent murder in town in which four interns killed a leader in tech and learns that Lena’s boyfriend was close with the victim. Although suspicion builds that Sebastian could have been involved in the crime, the real mystery that Whoever You Are, Honey follows is that of identity, friendship, our relationship with tech, and coming to terms with our past.

Through Mitty’s and Bethel’s opinions about the tech industry and the lives of workers in tech, Olivia Gatwood offers fresh takes, such as: “That’s what she and Bethel hate about the influx of tech people, anyway, how obsessed they are with obedience. Fancying themselves rebels while measuring the success of a machine based on how well it listens.” But she also reflects on how her life resembles oddities emerging in the tech world. In a recent essay on Lithub, Gatwood describes feeling akin to her AI character, Lena, as the writer herself built her appearance to look more like her friends.

Lena’s perfect body is a foil to the humanness of aging and imperfection. With descriptions of Bethel’s aging and broken body, we encounter a woman who has allowed her body to age but who tragically gave up on her ambitions when she lost her natural beauty. Gatwood also pays particular attention to her characters’ complexion, noting when one has acne scars or a pink flush from eczema. This starkly contrasts Lena’s perfect complexion, as she needs no eczema creams or lotions; her bathroom cabinets are empty. Lena wishes for scars, birthmarks, and wounds to prove she is human and carry her personal history on her body. After finding no evidence of her identity in her home, Lena searches for evidence of who she is by looking at herself naked in the mirror:

She should be satisfied, having discovered nothing wrong. But instead, she feels empty. She knows how other women talk about their bodies with a painful degree of focus. She’s heard them cry about aging as though it were a thief that came in the night and took away everything they were born with, everything they’d fought for. She has seen the way they brawl with their bodies, buffing their limbs with exfoliating gloves and training their stubborn shapes to behave, first at the gym, then by scalpel if the cardio doesn’t take. She understands why beauty feels like something worth guarding for those women. They’ve earned it. But Lena has never worked for her body. She’s never silently begged for anything about herself to change; not really […] Maybe, she thinks, if she did find something wrong, it wouldn’t be all that bad. Maybe then her body would feel like her own.

These lines, which would not be surprising as a standalone poem by Gatwood, offer an early glimpse into Lena’s descent into psychosis. Her suspicion that she may be a robot, created by her AI developer boyfriend Sebastian, continues to grow from here.

Olivia Gatwood’s women struggle with feeling that their lives are over after a trauma to their body: after a dancer breaks her leg, a part of her “dies”; after a model’s face is crushed and reconstructed, she retreats to a life of solitude. However, by humanizing her fembot in her search for herself, Gatwood offers this AI’s desire to be “real” shows that our bodily imperfections and pasts are what make us sumptuously human.