"I discovered One Direction when I was 11, and a band 'hiatus' and over a decade later, I still make the pilgrimage to Harry Styles shows. With a title from the band's song "I Want to Write You a Song," Everything I Need I Get From You is a lovingly researched look at the inner workings and impact of One Direction's fan culture from someone on the inside.
Because people tend to devalue spaces dominated by young women, fandom is largely oversimplified as hysterical and toxic. In this book, the author reframes this popular view of fangirls to show how they use their passion to shape trends and create spaces of belonging. And sow chaos, of course.
If you, like me and the author, found community in a fandom (especially One Direction's) in your formative years, this book is nostalgic and a lot of fun."
Publisher MCD x FSG Originals
Publication Date 2022-06-14
Section New Titles - Paperback / Sociology / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Victoria Y.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780374539184
"Everything I Need I Get From You will fascinate aficionados, but even for someone who’s never so much as logged on, it makes a rich and heartfelt explainer on the feelings and phenomena that thrive on the internet." —Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing
A thrilling and riotous dive into the world of superfandom and the fangirls who shaped the social internet.
In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternative universe: stan culture.
In Everything I Need I Get from You, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members' allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today, effectively making One Direction the first internet boyband. “Before most people were using the internet for anything,” Tiffany writes, “fans were using it for everything.”
With humor, empathy, and an expert's eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From alarming, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany’s book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the internet forever.
