Cult Classic
The Pink Hotel
Books

Everything I Need I Get from You

9780374722722 fc
Paperback, MCD × FSGO, 2022
200082731

Kaitlyn Tiffany

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"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.

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  • "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

  • 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

  • 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.  

    Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love

  • "Immensely entertaining . . . Well-versed in this subsect of internet culture thanks to her own passion for One Direction . . . 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. Stans will want an encore."

    Publishers Weekly (starred review)