Hilary Zaid couldn’t have known, when she was writing Forget I Told You This, that Elon Musk was planning to change the name of Twitter to X, though she had probably already seen Facebook become Meta. These name changes indicate a shift in the tech age, a move from an earlier internet that was whimsical, if dweeby, to one that is sleek and sterile. The comic book names these firms have adopted aren’t fooling the public, who are well-aware social media is an enormous data mining operation. What the public is willing to do about that, and whether they even care, is less obvious.
What the public might do with that information is the subject of Forget I Told You This. The novel tracks Amy Black, a calligrapher who longs for an artist’s residency at Q, a company that is named like X but is a clear stand-in for Meta. Amy has prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and is obsessed with physical media — as a human counter to facial scanning technology and walls of computer text, she’s a delicious foil for the world that Q seeks to build. She mostly wants the artist’s residency, she admits, as a resume builder. Her career as an artist was put on hold while she raised her son as a single mother and took care of her aging parents. With her now-grown son out of the house, she feels angst about what’s next: “My son had left. My lover was gone. I didn’t need anyone. I didn’t want to.”
Connie, Amy’s former partner, left her life years ago, though Zaid keeps the details vague — that’s just one of the mysteries the novel uses to generate momentum. Amy’s hustle is transcribing love letters for strangers in her antique handwriting. One night, a mysterious, pursued man asks for a letter with a message Amy begins to think may be for her: “I need you to make Tal forget me.” Uncovering Tal’s identity takes Amy into Q’s campus, which is “large and lovely and surrounded by walls past which you couldn’t see the homeless encampments at all.” It also brings her into underground dance parties in abandoned Oakland train stations and into contact with The Neighborhood, an organization that emphasizes personal connection and hopes it can use Amy to wipe out Q’s vast stores of data. “We’re not a terrorist group,” the organization’s leader assures Amy. “We’re a neighborhood.”
Complementing Amy’s ethical dilemma, whether to join Q or cripple it, is a romantic one. One option is Blue, a tattooed, smoky artist met through a lesbian hookup app called scizr, a name so perfect one finds it hard to believe the app doesn’t already exist. On the other is Sandy Jensen, a bubbly careerist who is employed as one of Q’s evangelists. It will not shock the reader when Amy’s two dilemmas converge as one.
But while her ambivalence is understandable, her naivety can be inexplicable, and strains the reader’s engagement. When she hears that Q’s founder, M. David Hacker (really) has been called before Congress, she feels a wash of relief: “It made me feel better … It was all being sorted out through the official channels. It would all be all right.” Really? Zaid is using Amy to walk through a brief history of tech disillusionment, but this moment feels too easy. It’s difficult to believe in a character who trusts in government regulation one week and seriously considers mass-scale cyber sabotage the next.
Forget I Told You This is set in the near-future, one in which California’s rolling blackouts last for weeks instead of hours and in which even that state has made abortion a crime. This pessimism is of a piece with other contemporary fiction, like Gina Chung’s recent novel Sea Change, which also uses speculative elements to imagine a world just slightly more ravaged by climate change, just a little less free. The future setting is all about how the reader and the writer interact with the present. Zaid’s implied question is: “Are we building the world we really want?”
The novel reaches its climax at Q’s All Hallows’ Ball with a series of revelations about Q, Blue, Sandy, Connie and Tal. Some of the twists are fun, some are anticlimactic, and some just seem confusing. Amy makes the choices readers will expect of her as her education in the tech world comes to its end. But forget the tech stuff — this novel is worth reading as a queer coming-of-middle-age story. What’s most moving is the care Amy has for her family, the seriousness with which she takes her renewed artistic practice, her shock and delight at finding real passion on a dating app.
