Review: Vivien Horler

The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, by Clare Stephens (Atlantic Books Australia)

A few weeks ago I read a Guardian article about an Australian woman, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who in 2016 provoked a terrifying media backlash in an Anzac Day post. She had invoked “lest we forget” in referring to people in Australian offshore detention centres and the suffering of Syrians and Palestinians.

Anzac Day on April 25 is taken seriously in Australia. It is a public holiday, and commemorates all the Australian and New Zealand armed forces who have served and died in various conflicts since the disastrous Gallipoli landings in World War 1. It is not putting it too strongly to say the day is regarded as sacred.

So for a 20s-something Muslim woman – who happened to have been named Young Queensland Australian of the Year – to equate on Facebook the suffering of Muslims with that of gallant Australian soldiers was, to many, heresy.

“It was wild to observe,” she told the Guardian. “People kept being like, ‘Oh, it’ll blow over,’ and it never did.”

Months later she moved to London, where she still lives.

So I was interested when I picked up The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, a novel about a young online journalist who uploads an interview referring to abortion, and is then pilloried on social media – or as the blurb on the back cover says, faces “a brutal public shaming”.

People tell Ruby Williams it will blow over, if she just explains her views better, but her attempts to do that only make things worse. In a prologue, Ruby tells us: “For two weeks … I was the most hated woman in the country.”

She goes on: “When the internet is feasting on you, tearing the flesh from your bones like vultures descending on a corpse, you’re not meant to scream. You can, people assure you, simply turn off your phone.”

But you can’t, says Ruby, “because the internet and the pulsating reality inside it is not an illusion. It is the heartbeat of modern life.”

Ruby is the young editor-in-chief of Bared, an online news outlet that is soaring in popularity for running stories about the likes of the social media influencer who is exposed for abusing her toddler, a royal scandal, and the one about a woman who sent nudes to a guy who turned out to be her dad.

Ruby tells us, the readers, that she had a savant-like ability to predict what an audience would care about, the headlines they’d click on, like and share. “I knew how to read the mood online. To tap into the base instincts of human curiosity. To offer you content you couldn’t resist.”

This might not sound the kind of journalism you’d be attracted to, but then you probably aren’t the target market. Bared – tagline: “lay it all bare” – aims to attract young female readers by highlighting the complexities of their lives, areas the traditional media has generally ignored.

But now Bared has published an interview with the friend of a woman who had been murdered by her partner, an attack none of her loved ones saw coming. Then a friend of the victim contacts Ruby: she’d known something was off, that the partner had consistently humiliated her friend, until she had tried to leave.

Ruby writes this story up, only to have one Felicity Cartwright, a journalist on a rival publication, excoriate her in an online video. Responses include: “Just looked Ruby Williams up. She looks like she’s got an IQ of 0 and an iron deficiency.”

But Bared presses on and begins a daily series of articles, titled What No One Saw, about women who are hurt by their partners. One is the story of a woman who describes her relationship with a ghastly man, culminating in his forcing her to have an abortion. This interview is written by Ruby.

All hell breaks loose. Cartwright pounces, interpreting the story as a criticism of the woman and her decision to abort. Bared management comes down on Ruby. Why hadn’t she cleared the story, considering the volatile climate?

Vile comments appear online. Ruby is distraught. She tries to explain, but nothing helps.

Uninformed readers challenge sensible and legal journalistic conventions like the use of the word “allegedly”. People comment furiously to Ruby: “You know he did it. Why are you shielding him?”

It’s a terrifying scenario for the reporter, the likes of which could only happen now. I’m so grateful there was nothing like this when I was a young journalist.

The book has a bit of a twist in the end, which I found confusing (do we all suffer from impostor syndrome?) But it generally presents what today appears to be a scary truth.

The world has changed, and many of we older people have little idea of the pitfalls of the internet and the culpability of the billionaires (and the trillionaire) steering it. This novel – and the story of Yassmin Abdel-Magied – opens a window into an abyss.