YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY
An open-hearted interrogation of our digital selves, braiding cultural criticism, memoir, and narrative musings into an exploration of identity, girlhood, media, tech, nature and “finding the depth and beauty in the fucked-up world we live in” from a writer, artist, and influencer (Phoebe Bridgers).
You Have a New Memory is a deeply human inventory of the digital sphere, a searing analysis of the present and a prescient assessment of the future. In her highly anticipated debut, Aiden Arata brings us raw reportage from the liminal space between online and offline worlds, illuminating how we got here and where to go next.
An open-hearted interrogation of our digital selves, braiding cultural criticism, memoir, and narrative musings into an exploration of identity, girlhood, media, tech, nature and “finding the depth and beauty in the fucked-up world we live in” from a writer, artist, and influencer (Phoebe Bridgers).
You Have a New Memory is a deeply human inventory of the digital sphere, a searing analysis of the present and a prescient assessment of the future. In her highly anticipated debut, Aiden Arata brings us raw reportage from the liminal space between online and offline worlds, illuminating how we got here and where to go next.
With high-res, cosmic vision and razor-sharp wit, this kaleidoscopic collection of essays artfully explores what it means to exist on the internet. Arata exposes influencer grifts from the perspective of a grifter, digs into the alluring aesthetic numbness of stay-at-home girlfriend content creators, and interrogates our online fetishization of doom to grapple with the real-world apocalypse.
Arata is the wry, unexpected voice we need to navigate existing simultaneously as creators, consumers, and products in our increasingly braver and newer world.
- Grand Central Publishing
- Hardcover
- July 2025
- 240 Pages
- 9781538767597
Buy the Book
$28.00
About Aiden Arata
Aiden Arata is a writer and artist whose writing has appeared in publications including BOMB, NYLON, The Rumpus, The Fanzine, Hobart, and others, as well as NDA: An Autofiction Anthology (Archways Editions 2022). Arata’s visual and video work has been featured on platforms including Vice, The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Mashable, and The Washington Post. You Have a New Memory is her first essay collection. She lives in Los Angeles and on the internet as @aidenarata.
Praise
“Observations on the internet’s uncanniness are well trod, but Arata succeeds in making them feel fresh with memorable storytelling and sinewy prose… This will resonate with the chronically online.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“With You Have a New Memory Aiden Arata conjures a compelling, nearly impossible voice – a wise and melancholy detachment merged with deeply vulnerable, emotional truth. I hadn’t known how badly I needed such a guide through the times we’re surviving. In the lineage of Joan Didion, both searching and knowing, philosophical and frivolous, Arata’s insistence on finding meaning in our online and IRL experience is engrossing and inspiring.” —Michelle Tea, author of Modern Tarot
“Aiden Arata’s You Have a New Memory is utterly startling in its generosity: like any perfect gift, it is very hard at first to believe one deserves it. This opalescent collection holds, somehow, the inner light of the universe. Arata’s gaze is keen and gentle, graceful and curious, and there is no subject too large or too small for her–animal consciousness, human violence, Dalmatian-print tights, deep time; the call of the silica gel packet, the threat of the germ and of the corporation, it’s all here: the unbearable terror and beauty of life as it is right now, and as it has always been. To share the space of Arata’s eyeline is to be changed.” —Alexandra Tanner, author of Worry
“An instant classic. Aiden Arata’s You Have a New Memory mines the origins of digital personhood, riding the line between high and low, humor and hopelessness, the search for the self in the mirror of our screen, all without turning away from the radical rawness of the human soul. The result is wholly original and achingly honest, the truth of our current moment telegraphed by an artist uniquely positioned to foretell our future. I couldn’t put it down.” —Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica and Jell-O Girls
“Poignant, hilarious, surprising, and wise, Aiden Arata’s searing debut took my breath away. I’d happily read her takes on anything after this, but having her razor-sharp criticism zeroed in on internet culture–how it shapes us in ways we’re only just starting to be aware of–is invaluable.” —Gabrielle Korn, author of Everybody (Else) Is Perfect