Just Watch Me

Dell Danvers drops out of NYU and walks off a shift at a Manhattan juice bar. She opens a livestream titled MY SISTER IS IN A COMA #LOL. Her sister Daisy has been ruled vegetative, and the hospital is about to stop paying for her care.

Dell needs fourteen thousand dollars a week to keep Daisy on private life support. She commits to raising it with a full week of nonstop broadcasting under the handle mademoiselle_dell, one chapter for each day. The stream runs threaded through with forum chatter and her mother's voicemails.

Her audience grows fastest when she eats something hot on camera. The peppers climb from jalapeño to ghost pepper to the Carolina Reaper, chasing the next spike in viewers. A troll who claims to know her real story starts threatening to post it.

Just Watch Me is a tragicomedy about what the internet asks a person to trade for attention, dark and often very funny. Lior Torenberg builds it to move the way a feed does, each day accelerating past the one before it. Dell stays reckless and resourceful throughout, never quite easy to like.