THE DISTRACTIONS

From the author of Mexican High and The Marriage Act, Liza Monroy, comes a new novel - an AI-story.

At a professional convention, solitary tech worker Mischa Osborn, who is mourning the shelving of her passion project - an algorithm capable of love - has a chance encounter with a HighlightReel celebrity, Nicolás Adán Luchano. Mischa experiences a brief but intense connection she mistakenly believes is going to last forever and will grant her a starring role and partnership she'd never admit to having wanted, least of all to herself. After Nic vanishes, she watches him relentlessly onReel until she discovers the truth about what happened, which, rather than giving her the answer she thinks she needs in order to move on, only leads her further down a spiraling rabbit hole of obsession and even "realspace" stalking, all the way from New York to Paris to Los Angeles. When her journey and its ensuing deceptions land Mischa square in the life and world of "momfluencer" Ari Tyler-McKenna, who on the surface couldn't be more different from Mischa, Mischa discovers that what connects us are the common feelings simmering below the surface, feelings of tech-induced disconnection, and the desire for something that seems just out of reach no matter who or where you are, threads that cannot be watched onReel. Meanwhile, as Mischa obsessively watches Nic and his new love, someone is equally obsessed with Mischa, tracking her every move, perhaps even controlling her story. The Distractions invites us to reflect on who we are watching, and why. After getting her start in the storied William Morris Agency mailroom, Liza left the business side of creativity to pursue her calling as a writer. Her books include the memoir The Marriage Act: The Risk I Took To Keep My Best Friend In America And What It Taught Us About Love (Counterpoint/Soft Skull 2014), the debut novel Mexican High (Spiegel & Grau/Random House 2008), and Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press 2016), a collection of personal essays based on one of the "most popular, provocative, and unforgettable" columns for The New York Times' "Modern Love" column and a voicemail from an ex. Another of her "Modern Love" installments was selected and read by Malin Ackerman for the series' podcast. Her Longreads essay "Soli/dairy/ty" was selected for The Best American Food Writing 2021. Liza's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, O, Marie Claire, Longreads, and many other publications and anthologies, including The New York Times' Best of Modern Love, Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, O's Little Book of Calm and Comfort, and Wedding Cake for Breakfast. She was the inaugural John E. Nance Writer-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio and has been awarded residencies at the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando and Kimmel Nelson Harding Center. She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 2010 and lives in Santa Cruz, CA.