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 argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today.
She approaches her subject with a wry critical distance — which is actually, she argues, an underappreciated but common fan characteristic ... Tiffany traces the shifting status of fangirls in the culture at large ... Tiffany is at the height of her powers when she is describing, with touching specificity, why it might make sense for a person to invest serious time and money into a bunch of cute boys singing silly love songs. She contextualizes fandom as a culturewide coping mechanism and creative outlet ... Fandom can be a route toward cyberbullying a baby, or it can be a way of figuring some things out about yourself. Sometimes, it can even forge a writer as funny and perceptive as Kaitlyn Tiffany.
Doling out droll insights alongside expertly dissected tweets, Atlantic staff writer Tiffany takes readers down the rabbit hole of the internet, One Direction, and rabid fandom in this immensely entertaining debut ... 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.
Entertaining ... She tracks One Direction’s early fame from episodes of The X Factor to sold-out arenas around the world and deftly articulates the perfect storm of social media, hysteria, and mythmaking that made such a success possible ... An enthralling study of how some fans try to create juicy lore out of nothing, often with problematic results ... Despite its focus on One Direction, the text buzzes with broader relevance that should appeal to readers interested in the 'unlimited chaotic energy' of life online ... A finely balanced pop-culture investigation.
