Quick Take
First-time novelist Olivia Gatwood used family history and her own lived experience to explore how Silicon Valley values are shaping life in Santa Cruz in her new book, “Whoever You Are, Honey.” She’ll be at Bookshop Santa Cruz to discuss it July 10.
The writer Olivia Gatwood believes that Santa Cruz has undergone two deep and fundamental cultural transformations in the past 60 years or so. The first one is obvious to many, the arrival of the University of California in the mid-1960s, coupled with the larger peace-and-love counterculture, which together shaped the city’s famously free-spirited vibe.
The second transformation is perhaps not quite as stark and sudden, largely because we’re still in the midst of it. That’s the gradual but inexorable influence of nearby Silicon Valley, which is most conspicuous in the maddening and unremitting rise in housing prices and availability. But, said Gatwood, it’s not just Silicon Valley economics that’s warping Santa Cruz’s culture, it’s the values of tech as well.
“I became really interested in the impact that tech has on the way we relate to one another,” she said. “But it’s not just how it changes the world around us, in terms of how we use our phones, but also what it means for a culture to start really prioritizing efficiency and perfection and minimalism and obedience. And I was especially interested in how that impacts women, and how men see women.”
Gatwood is the author of a new novel, her first, titled “Whoever You Are, Honey.” She comes to Bookshop Santa Cruz on Wednesday, July 10, to talk about her book in a conversation with local writer Liza Monroy.
“Whoever” is about many things, but it’s primarily about, as Gatwood sees it, what’s happening in Santa Cruz right now. It’s a psychological thriller focused on the mystery in getting to know new neighbors. In this case, the neighbors are longtime old-school Santa Cruzans living next to newly arrived techies.
Gatwood is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. But her mother, Jill Magruder Gatwood, is Santa Cruz County born and raised. Gatwood herself moved to Santa Cruz a couple of years before the pandemic.
The novel is steeped in Santa Cruz, in not only its place names, but in its history and environment, with references to everything from Jack O’Neill’s house to the infamous 1970s murder trio of Frazier, Mullin and Kemper. The story is centered on a young local woman named Mitty who lives with a much older roommate, Bethel, who has lived in and experienced Santa Cruz for decades. Bethel is, in fact, the last holdout in a community of recently resold beachfront homes near New Brighton State Beach. Their new next-door neighbors are Sebastian and Lena — he’s a well-heeled tech exec deep in artificial-intelligence research and development; she’s his outwardly perfect but vaguely troubled girlfriend. The tension comes from Mitty’s consuming and often erotic curiosity for Lena.
“The Santa Cruz I understood was always through my mom’s eyes,” said Gatwood, 32, who moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago. “My mom grew up in Scotts Valley, steeped in nature. The stories I knew were from that landscape. I moved there because I was dating someone who was a surfer and always wanted to live in Santa Cruz.”
Through her mother, she had heard a lot of stories about how the university turned Santa Cruz into a different place by the early ’70s. And it was through her own experience that Gatwood saw how tech money and values have affected Santa Cruz’s unique personality.
“The longer I was there, the more I realized that the same sort of social tug of war for the city that I had been hearing about growing up was happening, because of the influx of tech,” she said. “Now, people who work in academia, at UCSC, are the old-school locals. When my mom was growing up, they were the newcomers. But now they’re the locals at odds with people who were moving in, who worked in tech, and who were raising home prices and changing not just the economical landscape, but the social landscape.”
As a storyteller, Gatwood’s orientation is clearly from a feminist perspective. In talking about her experience getting to know tech people while living in Santa Cruz, she repeatedly underscored the obvious point that they were almost all men. One of the primary themes of the book, in fact, is how women have to adapt to a social and economic structure imposed by men.
“The idea of a 9-to-5 schedule, for example,” she said. “That schedule isn’t just something that was created within the context of capitalism, it was also created by men. It honors the biological male hormonal cycle, that you don’t go through these fluctuating energy levels throughout the day, that you can wake up at 8 a.m. and have energy to go to work at 9 to 5. It’s so fascinating to look at the way our world is built and see how human bias plays into that. I mean, the fact that all of our or most of our digital helpers, like Alexa or Siri, these AI voices that we talk to and tell to change the music or whatever, almost all of those are the voices of women. And that is not a coincidence, and it’s because we are more comfortable and used to women in positions of service, because that makes more sense to us. And that’s because they were invented by men.”
Gatwood is most well-known as a poet and spoken-word performer. Her poetry has reflected her interests in women’s lives, true crime, gender and sexuality. But her experience in Santa Cruz and the themes of tech’s influence socially moved her to dive into fiction. “Whoever You Are, Honey” is her first novel.
What makes “Whoever” even more compelling is its suggestion that the familiar transformation that tech has had on Santa Cruz might be on the verge of a potentially darker and more confusing new phase of that cultural shift. And that has to do with AI. Much like popular films such as “Ex Machina” and “Her,” Gatwood’s novel addresses ideas of AI and the dimension to which tech shapes and distorts human relationships, especially between men and women, and even identity.
“It all really plays into a conversation about invention,” said Gatwood, who wrote the book while living in Santa Cruz. “It’s impossible for a human being to invent something without bias, without their own history and identity playing a role. So, what does it mean when a field that’s dominated by white men is responsible for creating essentially some version of a human being, and especially some version of a woman? What does that mean for who she is, what her humanity looks like, how she relates to other people?”
The Santa Cruz that emerges from “Whoever” borrows a page from “The Lost Boys,” a fun, colorful playground of a city with undercurrents of struggle and menace. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and Capitola Village also play prominent roles in the book as a backdrop to an unsettling story about figuring out the backstory of a compelling stranger. The fact that Gatwood spent most of the pandemic living alone in Santa Cruz informed the vibe of her novel as well.
“The thing I really loved about Santa Cruz when I first moved there was this frozen-in-time feeling. There were so many parts of it that felt that they would never change. It has this sleepy old beach town feel that I hope it never loses,” she said. “Santa Cruz was the first place I ever moved away from that I didn’t want to leave.”
As for AI and its rapidly developing future, Gatwood offers nothing in the way of prediction. It’s important, however, she said, that we all examine how tech shapes our attitudes and habits, and how AI might change that dynamic.
“The way I look at things is through a social lens,” she said. “I just think it’s worthwhile for people to look at the way tech influences us — not just how much time we spend looking at our phones. But, rather, what are the ways that the culture is becoming progressively more interested in and invested in [the tech values of] minimalism, obedience and efficiency? What does that mean for us as humans who are not minimalist, not obedient or even not efficient by nature? I mean, we’re just animals. I just wanted to put my hat in the ring for that conversation.”
Olivia Gatwood will appear live at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Wednesday, July 10, at 7 p.m. It’s free.
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