Geordie Williamson

Well, yeah, you've got it quite right.

She's a really lovely and engaging figure.

You can see that she's just a really odd fit for suburban Cincinnati.

Her mother just wants her to be a tidy young woman.

She's gloriously messy.

She adores her grandmother, even if she doesn't get along with her mum, Boobie.

who is, I think, although it's not made explicit, a Holocaust survivor.

So it's a middle-class American Jewish family with a wild young granddaughter and daughter who is grieving at the novel's outset at the loss of her beloved uncle, the one person that she really felt that she could connect with, particularly because of her problem with her mum.

but who has died of something she discovers is called GRID, but it's basically an early iteration of what became to be known as AIDS.

So the knowledge of her uncle's death is,

is made worse by the secrets that swirl around it, the shame that attends to it.

His sexuality was a secret that he kept from her, although he tried to contact her multiple times before his final death, and she, to her eternal shame, refused to talk to him.

But he leaves for her some floppy disks...

And those discs contain a game.

And we're talking about 1983.

This is really early coding.

But it's a period where there's a lot of kind of utopian thinking in Silicon Valley and across the world about what coding might enable human beings to do, the way that it might allow connection, allow exploration, allow communication.

kind of democratic play of imagination, you know, and we thought about the early internet was going to be like this as well, and look how that played out.

But at this moment of utopian possibility, these floppy disks become a way for the young woman who has an interest in coding to

and who indeed shares a sense of outsiderdom with her uncle, who nonetheless kind of hid it better.