“You won’t believe this, but it has come up quite a lot.” The speaker is young Irish author Catherine Prasifka. The ‘it’ is the identity of her sister-in-law – Sally Rooney, creator of zeitgeisty blockbusters Normal People and Conversations With Friends, books which have been praised by Taylor Swift, no less, and whose sales are now counted in the millions. Rooney is married to Prasifka’s maths teacher brother, John. So yes, it’s a connection which is likely to be mentioned frequently.

Having another writer in the family is useful in terms of advice on things like contracts or dealing with publicity, of course. “But then it’s a double-edged sword, obviously, in terms of how people talk about my work. But I suppose it can only help the search engine optimization of articles about me.”

The 28-year-old Dubliner is never far from a search engine, the internet being an ever-present in her life just as it is in the lives of her friends and contemporaries. The online world is never far from her fiction, either. Not in acclaimed 2022 debut novel None Of This Is Serious, and certainly not in her new work, This Is How You Remember It. As for the zeitgeist, she’s well and truly plugged in.

Opening on an Irish family beach holiday in 2003, This Is How You Remember It is written in the second person and follows an unnamed protagonist across a decade and a half of her life, from the age of seven through to the end of her time at university in Dublin.

The Herald: Sally RooneySally Rooney (Image: free)

She has all the usual stuff to negotiate – friendships, family, boys, school – but there’s a big difference here from your traditional teenage rite-of-passage stuff. Prasifka’s Everygirl is growing up in an era when just a few keystrokes of the family computer brings up anything from cat videos and unicorn emojis to graphic images of sex and violence.

Later, as the technology moves into the palm of her hand thanks to internet-enabled devices, she’s able to retreat into the privacy of her bedroom for more of the same. Watching pornography becomes commonplace. So does sexting. “Things that you once found disgusting you now find funny,” Prasifka writes. “Things that you once found degrading become normal.”

Her friends are all doing the same thing. So in the whiteboard jungle that is her school, things start to change as the online world affects the real one. Behaviour in particular is altered. Now when the boys are clustered around something in the playground, it’s likely to be a video of a terrorist beheading.

Now those first sexual fumblings with boys are informed and shaped by what they have gleaned from watching pornography, and raise troubling questions about coercion and consent. Now the social pressures don’t stop when the school day ends: there are still Facebook posts to scroll through in the endless search for validation through likes.

Prasifka was born in 1996, so she was the same age as her protagonist in 2003. The ‘you’ in the novel is her, but it’s also everyone else her age who either had similar experiences or knows someone who did. Still, it’s an unusual stylistic choice, and one which is generally difficult to pull off. That Prasifka manages it lends weight to the opinion of the Irish Times critic who found she needs none of Rooney’s “fairy dust” when she so ably “makes her own magic” instead.

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Writing in the first person “made the tone of the book make sense to me because that’s how the internet talks to us,” she says. “I wanted people who grew up this way to feel represented, to feel like this is accurate. And I wanted those who don’t know what it’s like to feel uncomfortable. I wanted to directly make them complicit inside the narrative. I suppose it’s a little bit accusatory.”

If that’s you and you didn’t grow up with any of this, reading Prasifka’s novel will not make you regret it. It will make you alarmed. Prasifka does offer some redemption in the form of a love story whose arc neatly circumscribes the action, but it’s a backdrop. As for the foreground – the experience of growing up with social media and the internet and all the pressures and perils it brings – Prasifka does not pull her punches.

“I don’t set out to write novels about the internet being bad, and cautionary tales and things like that. I set out to accurately portray what’s happening,” she explains. “I suppose I’m trying to start that conversation. I didn’t try to embellish anything to make it worse, to make a point. I tried, through talking to my friends and people who grew up online, to just accurately portray the formative experiences that we all had.”

The book is intended as “a communal act of recollection” for those same people, she says. The cohort of late Millennials and early Gen Z-ers she likens to a “guinea pig generation”, who were let loose unsupervised in a sort of online Wild West with few if any safety controls. And though there are more safeguards in place today and more discussion of the potential for harm, Prasifka is pessimistic about its efficacy and gloomy about the general direction of travel.

“I think if you’d asked me even a few years ago, and certainly when I was a teenager, what I felt about social media, I would have said: ‘Well, there’s a capacity for harm but also a capacity for good’. But I think the direction everything is going in is diminishing the capacity for good, and making capacity for harm so much greater.”

This Is How You Remember It by Catherine Prasifka is published on May 2 (Canongate, £16.99)