The television channel TLC magnetized me as a child. In the dark hours of the evening between homework and the next day I secretly watched unputdownable series—My Strange Addiction, Hoarding: Buried Alive, Sister Wives—all sense of time lost. With an entire house asleep the ritual was not forbidden, but an unvoiced secret. Lior Torenberg’s Just Watch Me pulls readers into the broadcast of Dell, or rather mademoiselle_dell, whose livestreams begin as a fundraising effort for her sister’s life support and end up taking on daring crowdsourced and -funded challenges reminiscent of the 2016 film Nerve.
Dell Danvers cannot hold a job or so we learn as she hurls a jar of almond butter at a customer during her most recent minimum wage foray, Juice Body. Out of a job and second chances, she trudges back home to a studio apartment that’s been taken over by plants due to Dell’s side hustle as a plant propagator: a skillset akin to Reina Mori’s in Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six. However, while Atlas’s chosen protégés harbor magic, Hell’s Kitchen houses Dell’s singular friend Lee, whose unit also houses the bathroom.
Definitely broke and somewhat lonely, Dell adopts the generational coping mechanism of speaking into the void, LiveCasting from her apartment as the viewers trickle in. What starts as a dare to devour the five jalapenos on her propagated plant proves double-digit lucrative. And Dell doesn’t stop; she eats various peppers, sleeps within hand distance, and even brings her LiveCast audience into the bathroom with her. Confined to the first-person perspective of Dell, the reader like the LiveCast viewers is propositioned that this auctioneering of privacy is normal, a Machiavellian end ($14,000) by the means of putting peppers in various orifices and answering to the behest of perturbed user excelsior404.
Lee’s question of Dell’s choice, watching the livestream from afar, and refusal to be on camera permeate as the voice of reason, for while mademoiselle_dell’s cast hosts many followers her apartment and life remain populated by the mother she dodges, memories of her sister, and the affably charming Lee—an eventual punching bag to the emotional throughline.
The plot tracks in two parallel emotional arcs: the medical state of her sister, Daisy, and excelsior404’s threats to expose Dell, which would pull the financial rug out from under her metaphorical room, if her studio apartment can even afford a rug. Daisy’s presence provides an opportunity to peer into the birth-order dynamics of Dell’s childhood; her entrance into the narrative is prompted by Dell’s thoughts about her sister, which are primed by dodging her mother’s phone calls—a consistent reminder of whatever Dell is hiding. As for excelsior404, the screen name and lurker as a character is sparse in physical descriptions, except for those thrust upon Dell, and general traits become a typecast for the internet vigilante and self-labeled Robin Hood from the safety of anonymity and nothing better to do.
Why LiveCast. Why read. Lior Torenberg’s commitment to first person integration with the mixed text of LiveCast chats bring the reader into Dell’s world filtered through the interface she uses to talk to others, broken up by the way she talks to herself. The pages fly by in a play-by-play of Dell’s next pepper challenge, providing the reader access to interpersonal interactions when the followers are on mute. The structural choice to incorporate the interface’s affordances is a nod to Carmen Maria Machado’s “Especially Heinous” while remaining rooted in Dell’s POV compared to LiveCast.
Just Watch Me is an amalgamation of the early-’20s searching of Fiona Warnick’s The Skunks, the anxiety-riddled dodging and communities of care in Emily Austin’s Interesting Facts About Space, and the hiding even from yourself in boygenius’s “Letter to An Old Poet” and more literarily Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine; Dell Danvers is not. When not emotionally evasive, Torenberg’s blunt prose mirrors the narrative voice of Selin in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot—less guided by the philosophical framework of university study, but captivating as the reader is drawn into Dell’s world, where only mademoiselle_dell can choose if we leave it.
FICTION
Just Watch Me
By Lior Torenberg
Avid Reader Press
Published January 20, 2026
