Books

Pip Finkemeyer
One Story

You may be forgiven a shiver of schadenfreude when told the premise of Pip Finkemeyer’s One Story: a tech billionaire flees Silicon Valley to hide in Indonesia from criminal charges for exploiting user data. If real-world lawmakers lag behind the tech companies and chief executives who find ever more creative ways to manipulate us online, at least we can have our revenge in fiction.

One Story’s antihero, Dot Van Jensen, is tech billionaire par excellence, arising from the dotcom crash unscathed, pioneering the digital revolution and amassing untold riches along the way in material currency and the abstract capital of human data. This alternate history is a one-woman show, where no tech bros crowd the stage.

Dot island-hops through Indonesia, seeking information about a forthcoming documentary in which whistleblowers and ex-loyalists will leak the scandalous details of her crimes. We embark on excursions through the past, learning about One Story, an app that consolidates all daily events into a single, bespoke paragraph. I hoped to read these individually tailored paragraphs as the algorithm splintered reality, but they are only ever spoken about.

Along this main narrative, we see Dot’s hot-and-cold romance with Rae, an amateur comedian poached by Dot to teach her the arts of relatability, and her son, the Aldous Huxley-obsessed Jon, who was educated on an off-grid ranch away from the corrupting influence of the digital world. Jon’s technological illiteracy, however, doesn’t stop him from becoming the third co-founder of One Story alongside Dot and Rae. He learns on the job, in what could’ve been but never becomes a lens through which to inspect the politics of nepotism.

Dot’s crimes are partly connected to One Story’s pillaging of user data and shaping of different narratives to keep people engaged, but they’re also a modified retelling of a true event. I won’t say which one, but the real chief executive embroiled in the scandal emerged, unlike Dot, unscathed.

The dissonance in Finkemeyer’s approach is the blended narrative mode: it is part cautionary tale, part rom-com. Dot’s swaggering, quippy, self-aggrandising voice dominates these pages. She code-switches from moment to moment, here a Randian heroic capitalist, there a margarita-shaking cool boss. Finkemeyer’s stylistic construction of Dot’s first-person point of view aims for relatability – a mode similarly employed in her debut, Sad Girl Novel. But what has made billionaires such objects of fascination is how obscenely unrelatable their lives seem, how disconnected these purveyors of human networks are: plugged in, tuned out.

Ultimo Press, 368pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "One Story".

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