INTERVIEW: Abigail Stewart
Select Screen
Abigail Stewart
Whiskey Tit
An interview with Spencer Tierney
Last September, I heard Abigail Stewart read an excerpt from her novel, Select Screen (Whiskey Tit, 2025) at a literary event. The theme was surveillance, and as a bassist played suspenseful music, Stewart read a vignette about a budding YouTube star hearing footsteps in a cemetery where she liked to film. I tensed and felt the knots in my shoulders.
Select Screen is not a typical novel. Numbered sections focus on different characters connected to the internet in various ways. Influencers perfect their camera angle to model bikinis, e-Sports gamers stream their competitions to their fans, and a grad student starts posting YouTube videos about the histories of people buried in a local cemetery.
I caught up with Stewart over Zoom to discuss how she wrote this book about internet culture and the people moving on and off camera. It’s a book where the most recurring character, the internet, is never experienced the same way by anyone. It also changes enough over time that this book is already a period piece about a certain era of the internet. After all, the internet is memorable because of the people, the content, and the many, many comments.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Spencer Tierney: What drew you to wanting to write about internet culture?
Abigail Stewart: I was on the internet very early, like the days of the pixel dolling community. I was 11. I’d go on and share these things I was very passionate about. Then I’d find a group of people on forums and text-based chatrooms who liked the same thing. I wanted to tell stories about that exciting aspect of the internet, but also modern issues like parasocial relationships.
ST: The back cover refers to Select Screen as a literary composite novel. Do you find this label helpful and/or how do you tend to describe the book structure?
AS: I don’t want to think of it as inaccessible, but it is different: Not really a novel but not not a novel. It’s a series of interconnected pieces rather than one long singular story. Literary composite novel or hybrid fiction is fairly accurate. I always approach my books and think, “I'm gonna write a normal novel this time!” and I never do. Every single time, I have had different POVs. But it was the best way to tell the story.
Whenever people ask what my book’s about, I start with the concept: “Can you disappear from the internet?” Then I explore that through different stories, different characters, always with the internet existing in the periphery of their lives. I wanted it to feel like you're browsing the web, like you're using StumbleUpon circa 2014.
None of us are having the same experience on the internet. Like on Twitch, I end up watching a random thing for an hour, and think, “what was that?” Same on TikTok. I’m scrolling and I’m like, “Oh, I wasn't expecting to watch 25 parrot videos today, but now I have.” I wanted the book to feel that way. Unexpected moments that aren’t just centered around video games or one character. Because that's not how we experience the internet.
ST: Oh, I love that. One very internet-y layer is the way internet comments respond to characters or events like a no-filter, classical Greek chorus from old plays. As you developed the texture of this project, how did you decide on adding internet comments?
AS: I knew I was going to have the comments. The Greek Chorus of the Internet is always there, even if we want to ignore it. People say, “Don’t read the comments,” but no one doesn’t read the comments, like be real. We do a lot of crowdsourcing for our own opinions, whether those opinions are of ourselves or a vacuum cleaner.
I explored that most in Astrid's story, through YouTube comments and a forum that had additional comments about her. Being a woman on the internet, people are always gonna comment on how you look and how you sound. Even when I was a faceless blogger, I had people tell me to kill myself over the dumbest stuff. I wanted to make sure that part was included because it affects how people perceive themselves and how they perceive humanity. And how commenters perceive humanity, because they start believing their own hype, thinking they can say whatever they want.
I also wanted to explore the way people feel deserving of people on the internet, that parasocial aspect. The “I feel like you owe me a comment.” No one owes you anything, even if you sponsor someone on Twitch, paying their little monthly fee and becoming a member of their Discord. I watched a lot of Twitch during the pandemic, like a lot. I got really into some of the gaming community, and I witnessed people putting gamers on a pedestal and getting angry if the gamers didn't do what they wanted them to do.
ST: A lot of your descriptions create this interplay between the real and the digital, especially the social media influencer section with Monroe and Casey. They take a breather from their photo shoot only once the sun passes, when unflattering shadows come out. Or Casey puts on an outfit and has a photo caption, “Let's go to brunch,” but in reality she's trying on several outfits. The vacation looks like work and the work looks like vacation. How do your characters navigate joy and hustle culture? Can they have both?
AS: I don't think so at this point. Life is hustle culture for them. I think influencing can become this 24/7 thing where you’re always looking for that next thing to record. So you're at a coffee shop, but how do you enjoy the coffee shop? Because you need to review it for your TikTok and tell your audience how good the matcha is. And if you don't explain, then how are you being real about your life? It becomes this mini-headed hydra. I imagine an intense push-and-pull where you just want to have a good time, but as they say, the phone eats first.
ST: This is a random offshoot, but as we talk about “the phone eats first” and photography, I’m wondering: Is light a normal thing you think about as you write?
AS: Yes! I feel like I go “setting, character, plot” when I write. I’m most interested in setting the stage. So if it's a certain time of day, if it’s golden hour and the light is dappling through the trees and making, say, gravestones look cool. I think that comes from teaching art and being an art history minor. I always find the background to be interesting. After setting, I like to develop characters. And the plot is sometimes secondary. I have an idea for it, but I really want to explore what this character is doing today. So I end up with these vignettes of moments. It's not the way that I thought my writing would evolve, but I'm having a good time.
ST: Can you speak to how, as you wrote about the internet, why we stay grounded in the characters' bodies and movements?
AS: I wanted the story to feel real. When you're watching an influencer, you don't see them log out and go lay by the pool. We see whatever they’re recording. I wanted the characters to feel like they exist in both spaces, the world and the internet. I also enjoy following characters around as they do banal things. I'm like, “oh, are you gonna go make a coffee? Let me describe it.”
ST: How did you come to the title “Select Screen?”
AS: The great thing about my publisher is that they didn’t fight me on the title. With Select Screen, it's the select screen in old-school video games like Super Mario where you’d press B to start. It’s also an action-oriented way to say we are choosing the screen. Spending three to six hours on our phones, computers, and if you work on a computer, too, it's even more.
ST: Your previous book, Foundations, had three distinct sections about three women from different backgrounds who live in the same house, decades apart. In Select Screen, the internet seems to do what the house did in your last book, which is this thematic and literal shared space for your characters. What was similar and different about writing into these two spaces, houses and the internet?
AS: Yeah, I mean, the internet kinda is a house, right? I wanted the house — and the internet — to feel like these unseen characters that thematically connect different stories — where everyone’s connected in unexpected ways. In Foundations, it was only a physical space. With Select Screen, I wanted to write my internet novel, basically. What is it like to inhabit reality and then the unreality of the internet, and how does that make us a full person? But writing about the house and the internet weren’t that different. They’re both spaces we live in.
ST: It feels like the internet changes faster than most landscapes. How did you pick the version of the internet that you did?
AS: When I wrote this book during the pandemic, I was deeply involved in these internet communities, and that was the freeze frame I chose. I was also thinking about 2018 when Twitter was still Twitter and Twitch wasn’t as monetized. Now, influencer culture is dying a little bit. I don't think it’s as prolific, or you're not able to do it full-time unless you were previously famous. The internet changes rapidly. I have favorite eras, and most of them dealt with Neopets.
ST: How did you research or consume social media while writing this book? Was it different from how you normally use social media?
AS: I spent a lot of time on Reddit reading rabbit-hole theories about influencers. And I read a lot of articles about people stuck in parasocial relationships with their fans. I wanted to know how influencers felt about them. It made me look critically, media critically, at what influencers posted. You look at a video and think, “What is this an ad for?”
I wanted the book to feel more behind-the-scenes and explore how streamers or influencers would feel when people model their lives off them. Do they feel pressured? Do they care? I wanted characters to have different feelings about it. Like if someone wants to give up the internet after they’re internet famous. Isn’t that what they wanted?
ST: Is the internet the villain of the book?
AS: I mean, it's the villain and the hero.
