Janelle Brown (1) (1973–)
Author of Watch Me Disappear
For other authors named Janelle Brown, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Janelle Brown is an American journalist and writer, born in San Francisco, California. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley. Her career includes being a staff writer for Wired, and writing for the websites HotWired and Wired News. She was editor and co-founder of Maxi, a women's pop culture webzine. show more Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Wired, Self, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She is the author of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, This is Where We Live, and Watch Me Disappear. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Janelle Brown
Associated Works
Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings (2007) — Contributor — 74 copies, 5 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1973-09-12
- Gender
- female
- Agent
- Susan Golomb
- Short biography
- Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Pretty Things, Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and This Is Where We Live. Her books have been sold in two dozen countries around the world. Pretty Things - named a Best Book of 2020 by Amazon - is currently being adapted for television by Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films.
Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Wired, Self, RealSimple, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. Previously, she worked as a senior writer at Salon, and began her career as a staff writer at Wired during the dotcom boom years, working on seminal Web sites like HotWired and Wired News. In the 1990s, she was also the editor and co-founder of Maxi, an irreverent (and now, long-gone) women’s pop culture Webzine.
A native of San Francisco and graduate of UC Berkeley, she has since defected to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband Greg and their two children. - Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- California, USA
Members
Reviews
We are undone by the specificity of our dreams. Reality can never live up to the shining edifices we forge inside our fantasies: Life, in all its confusing complexity, in destined to be a disappointment in comparison. The lottery winner discovers that riches don't equal happiness; the longed-for baby is colicky and sour; losing fifty pounds still doesn't bring you love; winning the election doesn't trigger societal change.
Jane was raised by her father off of the grid, hidden in the wilds of show more Montana. And now that she's seventeen, she's beginning to long for something more. Her only friend is the daughter of a bookstore owner who sells her father's newsletter on her shelf of locally produced zines, and she sees her only infrequently. She's never left their home alone, although her father often leaves for days. When she discovers that her father lied when he told her that her mother was dead, Jane dreams of running away to find her. When he gets her to create a website where he can post his anti-technological manifesto, she discovers the world of the internet, still in its early days in 1995. When her father hatches a plan that requires her help, she knows this is her chance.
The elevator pitch for this book is "What if the Unabomber had a daughter?" and there's no denying that the story held my attention throughout. And while the scaffolding of this story is fairly sensational, Brown uses it to look at how the internet and its uses has changed over time, the plucky pioneers giving way to corporations intent on using it to extract money. Jane's adventures once she runs away, as a teenage girl with no experience relating with the world, are unbelievable, but Brown's not looking to tell a sadly realistic story, but one that explores our relationship to technology and how that relationship has shaped us and changed over time. This was a novel with some thought-provoking ideas wrapped in a lot of thrilling plot. I am glad they decided against calling it The Unabomber's Daughter. show less
Jane was raised by her father off of the grid, hidden in the wilds of show more Montana. And now that she's seventeen, she's beginning to long for something more. Her only friend is the daughter of a bookstore owner who sells her father's newsletter on her shelf of locally produced zines, and she sees her only infrequently. She's never left their home alone, although her father often leaves for days. When she discovers that her father lied when he told her that her mother was dead, Jane dreams of running away to find her. When he gets her to create a website where he can post his anti-technological manifesto, she discovers the world of the internet, still in its early days in 1995. When her father hatches a plan that requires her help, she knows this is her chance.
The elevator pitch for this book is "What if the Unabomber had a daughter?" and there's no denying that the story held my attention throughout. And while the scaffolding of this story is fairly sensational, Brown uses it to look at how the internet and its uses has changed over time, the plucky pioneers giving way to corporations intent on using it to extract money. Jane's adventures once she runs away, as a teenage girl with no experience relating with the world, are unbelievable, but Brown's not looking to tell a sadly realistic story, but one that explores our relationship to technology and how that relationship has shaped us and changed over time. This was a novel with some thought-provoking ideas wrapped in a lot of thrilling plot. I am glad they decided against calling it The Unabomber's Daughter. show less
The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world. Jane Williams is seventeen years old and has grown up in an off-the-grid cabin in the Montana wilderness in the mid-1990s. Her entire existence is the world her father Saul has built: a woodstove, a vegetable garden, nineteenth-century philosophy as her curriculum, survival skills, and his unwavering certainty that modern society and technology are destroying humanity. Saul is brilliant, charismatic, and deeply show more paranoid — it's not entirely clear whether his fears are grounded in reality or mental illness, and probably the answer is both. He publishes a manifesto in zine form that almost nobody reads. He locks the television in his study. He treats Jane's occasional trips into Bozeman to visit her friend Heidi as dangerous exposures to a corrupting world. Her mother died in a car accident when Jane was three. That's all she knows.
Then Jane sneaks into Saul's study and finds a photograph of herself at three years old — labeled not with her mother's name Jennifer, but Esme and Theresa. Her father has been lying about who her mother was. And then comes the discovery that is far worse than a lie about a name — Jane realizes that her total devotion to her father has made her an unwitting accomplice to a horrific crime. She flees Montana and goes to the only place she has any connection to: San Francisco, 1997, at the exact moment the fledgling internet is transforming everything. The novel alternates between Jane's Montana past and her present-day frame, with the San Francisco section as a stunning counterweight — a city crackling with possibility and peril in equal measure. The fictionalized Unabomber figure threading through is named Adam Nowak. National bestseller, Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
[May contain spoilers]
Saul is directly connected to domestic terrorism — his manifesto and worldview are not just personal philosophy but operational. Jane's complicity, though unwitting, involves her presence and assistance during acts she didn't understand at the time. In San Francisco she connects with a young man named Lionel through one of the internet's first chat rooms, and their relationship becomes the novel's emotional counterweight — someone who helps her understand herself through genuine connection rather than her father's controlled narrative. Her mother Theresa/Esme's actual history unravels as Jane digs, and what she finds reframes her entire understanding of her childhood. The ending brings the present-day frame into focus — the reporter at the door with whom we opened — in a way that feels earned rather than gimmicky.
What I think: This is one of the most distinctive novels of 2025 — a coming-of-age story that's also a meditation on parental control, the birth of the internet, domestic terrorism, and what it costs to love someone who is also dangerous. The dual timeline structure is elegant, the Montana and San Francisco settings are both rendered with extraordinary specificity, and Jane is a remarkable protagonist navigating something genuinely unprecedented. It has the literary weight of The River Is Waiting and the propulsive quality of your favorite thrillers. Probably a strong 4 to 4.5 from you — possibly higher. show less
Then Jane sneaks into Saul's study and finds a photograph of herself at three years old — labeled not with her mother's name Jennifer, but Esme and Theresa. Her father has been lying about who her mother was. And then comes the discovery that is far worse than a lie about a name — Jane realizes that her total devotion to her father has made her an unwitting accomplice to a horrific crime. She flees Montana and goes to the only place she has any connection to: San Francisco, 1997, at the exact moment the fledgling internet is transforming everything. The novel alternates between Jane's Montana past and her present-day frame, with the San Francisco section as a stunning counterweight — a city crackling with possibility and peril in equal measure. The fictionalized Unabomber figure threading through is named Adam Nowak. National bestseller, Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
[May contain spoilers]
Saul is directly connected to domestic terrorism — his manifesto and worldview are not just personal philosophy but operational. Jane's complicity, though unwitting, involves her presence and assistance during acts she didn't understand at the time. In San Francisco she connects with a young man named Lionel through one of the internet's first chat rooms, and their relationship becomes the novel's emotional counterweight — someone who helps her understand herself through genuine connection rather than her father's controlled narrative. Her mother Theresa/Esme's actual history unravels as Jane digs, and what she finds reframes her entire understanding of her childhood. The ending brings the present-day frame into focus — the reporter at the door with whom we opened — in a way that feels earned rather than gimmicky.
What I think: This is one of the most distinctive novels of 2025 — a coming-of-age story that's also a meditation on parental control, the birth of the internet, domestic terrorism, and what it costs to love someone who is also dangerous. The dual timeline structure is elegant, the Montana and San Francisco settings are both rendered with extraordinary specificity, and Jane is a remarkable protagonist navigating something genuinely unprecedented. It has the literary weight of The River Is Waiting and the propulsive quality of your favorite thrillers. Probably a strong 4 to 4.5 from you — possibly higher. show less
Jane had lived with her dad in a cabin in the Montana woods for as long as she can remember, although they didn’t move there until her mother was killed in a car accident when Jane was very young. Her dad has homeschooled her and taught her to hunt and fish and, in general, to live off the land and off the grid. But lately he seems to be getting more erratic and paranoid than usual. When he comes home with a laptop and a modem, and had Jane learn how to set up a website so she can edit and show more upload his newly-written manifesto, Jane secretly scours the recently-created internet for information about her dead mother. What she finds disturbs her more than she already is about her father’s behavior, and it sets her on a path of escape from his mental instability and into the real world. But will it be soon enough for her to escape the madness he yet has planned?
Set in early 90s during the early days of the web and the Silicon Valley boom, this is both an interesting *gulp* historical fiction novel and also a pretty great thriller. The pacing is perfect and the story is well told. show less
Set in early 90s during the early days of the web and the Silicon Valley boom, this is both an interesting *gulp* historical fiction novel and also a pretty great thriller. The pacing is perfect and the story is well told. show less
this was a fun one. well, fun is maybe not the right word, bc none of them are rlly having FUN per say, but it was fun for me to listen to. i don't think i've read this author before, but i love me some complicated sister dynamics, and stories abt cults, and i like one of the narrators, julia whelan, so, i was sold from the get go. this delivered almost exactly what i wanted, a bit of a mystery, complex sister (and mother and daughter) dynamics, how ppl can get sucked into things (cults, show more addiction, etc.) that seem like they're helping you in the moment, or seem innocuous in the moment, but build up slowly over time until you're in too deep in a situation that you can't rlly see a way out or a different way of living even. overall, this absolutely kept my attention, and i liked the pace that everything was revelead. solid performance by both the narrators, though i did prefer whelean's parts. i'd def rec this one, and i'll look out for more by this author. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 7
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 3,315
- Popularity
- #7,718
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 154
- ISBNs
- 96
- Languages
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