I really, really like twitter. Haters, celebrity obsessives and angsty teenagers aside, there are some absolute geniuses pumping out little nuggets of comedy gold almost 24 hours a day. Some of the greatest examples come from friends like Caitlin Moran, Lauren Laverne and Grace Dent; blowing the ‘women aren’t funny’ argument to smithereens with their side-splitting observations.
So when The Twitter Diaries was promoted to me as ‘Bridget Jones tries social networking’ (The Evening Standard), I was eager to get my teeth into it. The joy of reading a tweet is the fact that their authors are real people; real women. It is the same quality that makes Bridget Jones’s Diary so appealing, and so popular. Both Twitter, and Bridge, revel in their own reality.
Though sadly,The Twitter Diaries, sadly, is not brilliant. For a book based on the ‘true’ friendship of co-authors Georgie Thompson and Imogen Lloyd Webber, it is so removed from reality that it cannot even give a realistic depiction of how twitter actually works. The gimmick is completely forced, with every mention of any character in the ‘@Twitter’ form. Not only does this make the text jarring and unpleasant to read; it doesn’t even make sense of the way Twitter works. The conversations are all ‘Direct Messages’, privately sent and seen by Stellar and Tuesday (I know, right?), which makes the whole idea of ‘mentioning’ someone utterly redundant. Every ‘@’ is like a little flag popping up; reminding us desperately of the cheap Twitter framing-device.
And so the book goes on; the entire thing written in tweets of 140 characters or less. Once the novelty of this wears off, it’s just boring. It is impossible to connect with the characters on any meaningful level because there is so little subtext to their lives. Both Stella and Tuesday are almost indistinguishable, and were it not for the ‘@StellaCavill’ or ‘@TuesdayFields’ proceeding every line of discourse, you could scarcely tell who was who.
Perhaps fun and original characters with an ounce of emotional weight would have salvaged a rather hackneyed plot. The only real stab at this is through the invention of Peter Mignon, the “famous transatlantic TV host… with a dubious dress sense”. This character is actually believable, and even familiar… Oh wait, that’s right, it’s just Piers Morgan with an embarrassing attempt at a false name. Not that you welcome his creep into yet another genre.
You can pretty much guess how the plot will roll out. It’s the same as that one you read on holiday last year, you know? The one about the women trying to balance their love lives with their careers, experiencing ups and downs and tears and laughs? Come to think of it, that book was kind of like the one you read the summer before, and the summer before that. That problem with these chick-lit novels is once you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. The only difference here is that you have to slog your way through a barrage of curling symbols before you reach the ultimately unsatisfying and predicable climax.
The Twitter Diaries is frightfully disappointing. Stella and Tuesday are likable enough, if not a little gratingly privileged and reminiscent of the spolit Made in Chelsea cast. But the whole novel is just flawed. Whether the whole Twitter-relationship idea could have been better executed by more skilled writers or whether Thompson and Lloyd Webber were restricted by the format is difficult to grasp.
What I do know is that the book lacks both originality and appeal and has none of the ingenuity and wit possessed by real women on twitter. I was hoping for a genuine and recognisable story of female relationships; a delving into the difference between appearance and reality on the web that explored the phenomenon of internet friendships. What you get, however, is a run of the mill chick-lit in clunky 140 character bursts. Bridget Jones it certainly is not.
The Twitter Diaries is available now from Bloomsbury.
Words: Jennie Pritchard