Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

"This is such an interesting book. It starts, as you say, from the experience of the author being mistaken repeatedly for the writer Naomi Wolf, and her indignation about that. Because here are two women who have gone on very different directions, politically speaking. She uses that as a jumping off point to think about the way in which we all have digital doubles – thinking about our social media presences, and the way we recreate ourselves digitally. She talks about what she terms the ‘mirror world,’ which is the way in which in the places Naomi Wolf has ended up – Steve Bannon’s show, this sort of thing – many of the stories being told by progressives go through the looking glass and become a kind of inverted version. So the ‘Big Lie’—that Trump won the election—is mirrored by the ‘Big Steal’—that Biden stole the election, for example. She examines this idea of doubling in all sorts of different ways that reflects on where we are politically, socially, and economically at this present moment. It becomes this incredibly clever, acutely observed, often funny meditation on the moment in history in which we are living."