The Novel Cure: Literary prescriptions for creating an online alter ego

Ailment: Creating an online alter ego

Cure: Second Life by SJ Watson

Reinventing yourself has never been easier, now that you can go online and present yourself in as many guises as you like. Liberated from our familiar selves, we can slide along the spectrums of age, gender and sexual availability, laying claim to any number of qualities or attractions without fear of comeback. Or can we? Keeping track of an alter ego – especially in as fertile a place as cyberspace – can be surprisingly difficult. Be warned by the fate of Julia in SJ Watson's new novel, whose attempt to live a second life puts her first in peril.

When her sister is murdered in Paris, Julia is thrown into turmoil. An ex-addict herself – now clean and happily married with a teenage son – she resists turning to alcohol. Instead, she steps on to what turns out to be another slippery slope: the sexual cyberworld previously frequented by her sister. Re-inventing herself as Jayne – single, free-spirited – she joins a dating site called Encounterz in the hope of tracking down her sister's killer. Soon she finds herself drawn into a terrifying and unpredictable surrogate life.

Here, she meets Lukas, whose company she finds both erotically exhilarating and alarming. But as Lukas demands of her time, and indeed seems bent on invading her non-cyberspace life as well, she finds herself being Jayne more often than Julia, and forgetting the mission for which she invented this persona. As the world of Encounterz and her real life threaten to collide, she becomes desperate to beat a retreat. But to do so she needs to kill off Jayne – and this turns out to be easier said than done.

Julia's other self leads her into a dangerous place of extortion and addiction – a world she thought she had escaped. Creating an alternative identity might be liberating; but be aware that alter egos have a way of taking on a life of their own. Make sure your real life is watertight before you interfuse it with others.

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