[Vagabond Press; 2024]
When I think of the spring of 2012, I remember spending all my free evenings with my two favorite floor-mates, squeezed side-by-side onto one girl’s twin bed, sipping Silk soy milk out of boxes with plastic straws and doubled over with laughter: we had just discovered Google search autofill. For every query we started typing, the search bar suggested variations that were alternately hilarious and relatable. The autofill function made us aware of ourselves as singular points within the great, global hive of humanity, all of us bewildered and searching for answers. What depictions of contemporary life could be collaged from these queries? One answer to this question is found in Australia-based author Caitlin Farrugia’s debut short prose collection, Search Histories, which uses the form of Google searches to explore the contours of the human experience.
Search Histories is 111 vignettes composed from search queries. The book, by employing minimalist language and simplistic, repetitive sentence construction, reaches for a kind of stripped-down, Hemingway-esque human insight. Each page-long vignette strives to tell a story, flayed to its essential elements. One page starts, “How to encourage your son even though he isn’t talented,” and after an evidently brief attempt to cultivate musical aptitude in the aforementioned untalented child, ends with, “Sell second-hand trumpet.” But the intimation of narrative is compromised by the lack of clarity around both timeline (chronology) and speaker. The speaker (or searcher) is never explicitly identified, and seems to change without pattern between vignettes. Farrugia’s flash pieces are voiced by a wide range of ostensible narrators, like a Greek chorus of social anxiety. In several pieces, the narrator seems to be a frazzled parent, whose searches start with “snacks for 7 month old” and rapidly escalate to, “am I a bad mum?” Pregnancy is a recurring topic in the book. Elsewhere, the narrator presents as an angsty teenager, searching for “cute boys 21 pictures brown hair tanned” and wanting to know things like “why do parents just lie and let you down all the time / can you citizen arrest your parents.” One particularly puerile vignette progresses “pictures of boobs / pictures of rly big women boob . . . pictures of faginas / delete history help . . . maths homework help.” Farrugia evidently decided it would reinforce the verisimilitude of her project to include the kinds of abbreviations and typos common to quick Internet searches, though the practical effect is to make the book feel shoddy and unpolished.
I suspect that Farrugia has packed so many perspectives into Search Histories in an attempt to dramatize the universality of our deeply personal concerns. Since she doesn’t differentiate between the various speakers, they all seem to carry the emotional maturity of the lowest common denominator, the searcher who queries, “do men hav boobs” and “can I fuck cheese.” This constant cycling through narrative voices made it hard for me to develop an investment in Search Histories. Farrugia’s book is more experimental than a traditional, plot-driven novel, but without any of the standard hallmarks of storytelling, I struggled to find an emotional entry point. The question “when do you let biological parents back into childs life?” comes sandwiched between “Etsy” and “how much to sell your art for.” Without any trappings of context, I fail to locate the pathos in Farrugia’s project. Is this part of the point—to marvel at all the unspoken permutations of human emotion that could be affiliated with one particular, decontextualized question? But the pacing of Search Histories doesn’t lend itself to this lingering.
Farrugia’s line-by-line vignettes purport to show the mind moving in real time, leaping from one imagined (and googled) possibility to the next. One string of queries proceeds from “union construction” to “hablar Spanish language school / authentic paella recipe” to “moving abroad as adult tips”—demonstrating how workplace dissatisfaction can progress, through a series of tantalizing images and hypothetical alternatives, to the evergreen fantasy of a different life, in a different place. Other vignettes demonstrate how successful Google searches can surface information that intensifies a searcher’s frenzy. One page starts, “why do we rely on fossil fuels?” What follows is a series of increasingly frustrated questions, ranging from “how big is this hole in the ozone layer” to “why arent these fucking companies held fickung accountable” and culminating in the fatalist couplet, “what’s the fucking point of fucking anything / tinder best pics for swipe right.”
Artists and writers have long been fascinated by the rogue potential of technology to reflect the collective subconscious. The purported omniscience of Google, paired with its ease and immediacy, has turned the search engine into a repository of our most intimate questions. Essayist Leslie Jamison uses a similar tactic to Farrugia and incorporates a breathless string of Google searches at the beginning of each section in her memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. “What is the robot owl that makes babies fall asleep? . . . What makes the queen ant want to start a new colony? What is the hourly rate for divorce lawyers in New York City? How will the Wolf Moon change my life?” The specificity and precision of Jamison’s queries sharpen their impact. Her questions—desperate, practical, and esoteric—reflect how social isolation drives us to conflate practical knowledge with existential insight. Much like in Search Histories, the searcher treats Google as a source of knowledge both quotidian and spiritual.
Before I started reading Search Histories, I expected it to be something like Sheila Heti’s recent Alphabetical Diaries, a nonfiction collection crafted out of individual sentences from ten years of journals, alphabetized. But where Alphabetical Diaries achieves its effect through accumulation, I struggled to stay engaged with Search Histories. The vignettes began to feel formulaic, as if each flash attempted to depict the book’s concept in full, rather than working in tandem with the surrounding pieces.
Many of the vignettes include dramatic tonal shifts. However, Farrugia’s shifts—instead of consolidating each piece with a turn before a moment of profundity, like the volta in a sonnet—reiterate the body’s tendency to seek physical or material comfort when faced with fear or uncertainty. “Where will my money go if I have no family,” starts one page, only to end, five lines later, with, “charlise Theron partially naked.” These juxtapositions, however intentional, pock-marked the text with inattention.
At times the searches are heartbreakingly poignant, like when the book poses questions for which most of us have long conceded there are likely no satisfactory answers. “How can there be a god if my brother is so sick,” one narrator asks. But just as often, the vignettes pitch toward the banal and mundane: “scooters for adults / scooters for really tall kids.” Existential questions often cede to more material ones: after worrying about covid and monkey pox, one searcher settles for “scrapbooking inspo.” A doom spiral about the apocalyptic TV show The Last of Us and a zombie takeover ends with “why is Pedro Pascals real voice so weird.” In brief, glittering moments, Farrugia captures and reflects the unnavigability of the modern world. “Ukraine ABC news . . . why is my eye twitching constantly . . . climate change and my kids future . . . RHONJ season 13 binge / how livable is mars” reads the final vignette, which pours out in a torrent of unanswerable concerns about the future and the vapid methods we’ve devised to blunt ourselves to the panic. Fundamentally, Search Histories is preoccupied with ways of achieving security in a precarious world, whether that security comes from stable family, romantic relationships, gainful employment or side hustle, celebrity or beauty.
A consistent paranoia thrums underneath much of the collection. Various narrators search for “flat earth theory / flat earth pictures,” “lists of reported ufo sightings wikipedia / earthfiles,” “evidence that Selena Gomez is a robot . . . can the news be trusted,” and ask, “are we just in a simulation? / download sims 4.” This dislocation from truth—a kind of ontological alienation—struck me as the most profound aspect of Search Histories. Google, the world’s most powerful search engine, became ubiquitous about two decades ago, supplanting many of our other immediate methods for inquiry. But now society seems to have fallen into an intellectual hellscape of our own making, since Google’s perceived effectiveness is tanking and results are now cluttered with the gobbledygook of AI summaries. How do we evaluate truth claims in the era of fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories? Search Histories doesn’t attempt to explore this existential question; rather, the text is animated by this anxiety.
These hundred-plus vignettes, united in their sense of exasperation with the world and its ills, made for a trying read. The book’s horizons were limited by the maturity of its narrators. As a reader, I felt more tarnished than titillated by the book’s voyeuristic construct. Jamison, in Splinters, refers to the exposing nature of one’s private searches: “Every time a friend googled anything on my computer, my armpits prickled with sweat,” she writes. “What would emerge from the confessional booth of my auto-complete?” But ultimately, Farrugia’s work seeks to be a window into the endlessly repeating human heart. Search Histories gestures toward our shared desires, fears, and hopes: love, belonging, family. When I think of those long-ago nights with my college friends—our sweaty bodies in a row on Rachel’s dorm bed, laughing until my ribs throbbed—I don’t actually remember any of the search queries we typed. I remember feeling that we had stumbled down the same blue-light-illumined rabbit hole as countless other individuals, possibly halfway around the world, and the distant resonance beckoned us to gaze into the screen and recognize our mirrored selves.
McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, critic, and artist based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA from Pacific University. McKenzie’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Belmont Story Review, the Offing, San Antonio Review, and elsewhere. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.
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