Search History

October 9, 2023
Taylor’s astute debut follows one young woman trying (and failing) to pursue a relationship unburdened by online baggage. Following a significant breakup, 29-year-old Ana relocates from Perth, Australia, but her fresh start in Melbourne is not going well. Her UX design work leaves her unfulfilled (“my job basically amounts to figuring out how many pop-ups I can force on a person before they leave a webpage”), and she deletes all her dating apps after an unpleasant sexual encounter. Seeking romance IRL is much easier than she’d expected, however; Evan, whom she meets at a bar, is handsome, successful, and thoughtful. When Ana scrolls through her new beau’s social media feeds, however, she learns his last serious girlfriend, a nearly perfect yoga instructor named Emily, died in a hit-and-run accident. Ana develops an online obsession with Emily, which compounds her own insecurities and threatens to derail her relationship with Evan. Though the lively pacing gets bogged down with heavy-handed broadcasting of themes and morals in the closing pages, the portrayal of Ana’s compulsive online sleuthing and accompanying self-loathing is funny, keenly observed, and, at times, painfully relatable. Taylor’s willingness to hold up a mirror to cringe-worthy impulses make her a writer to keep tabs on.

April 4, 2023
Most of us have left some kind of regrettable imprint on the internet. It’s with this discarded online ephemera that anxiety swells about what people may make of it all—including future partners. This angst about past online selves informs Amy Taylor’s quick-witted debut novel Search History. Ana is 28 and new to Melbourne, having fled Perth after a disastrous breakup. She has few friends and a job that inspires little excitement, so her focus becomes finding traction on the dating scene. After one particularly bad encounter via the apps, Ana decides to go offline and instead welcome the freedom that dating off the grid in a new city offers: 'The vastness of Melbourne allowed me to be anonymous but not alone.' Soon Ana has a chance encounter with a mystery man at a bar and finds herself completely beguiled by him. An obsessive online quest begins to piece together his romantic backstory. Social media proves a double-edged sword: Ana sources instructive intel on his past girlfriend but becomes fixated on why the relationship fell apart. Taylor writes in crisp and clever strokes, with many a metaphor helping convey Ana’s increasingly frayed courtship: 'Silence is rejection in slow motion. It’s an injury sustained from a blow that was never dealt.' With throwbacks to bygone MSN and MySpace habits, Taylor reminds us how fraught desire can be today when we mediate our judgements solely through the web. Search History is a light-hearted and earnest take on the challenges that courting has for those eager to hit search before the reply button.