Everything I Need I Get from You

How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

By: Kaitlyn Tiffany

Narrated by: Eileen Stevens

A thrilling and riotous dive into the world of superfandom and the fangirls who shaped the social Internet.

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost to an unfathomably large, interconnected, and influential multiverse: stan culture.

In this book, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at the Atlantic and proud superfan herself, guides us through the nebulous online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate streaming numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members' allergies, Internet typos, and hairstyles.

In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social Internet we know today, effectively making One Direction the first Internet boyband. “Before most people were using the Internet for anything,” Tiffany writes, “fans were using it for everything.”

With humor, empathy, and an insider’s eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims Internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From dangerous, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany’s book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the Internet forever.

©2022 Kaitlyn Tiffany (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Not a 1D fan — still great book!

If you’re online at all, this book will be interesting to you, regardless of how much you like 1D. Fascinating audio essay into how girls & young women optimized our current online world. Very cool

A beautiful ode to small meaningful things

I’m a lifelong member of multiple wide-ranging fandoms. My fandoms have gotten me through dark and deeply lonely times in childhood and as an adult. They have nourished me and enriched my inner life. They’ve facilitated instant connections with strangers who became friends and even repaired my relationship with my mother (thanks, BTS!). This is the first author I’ve come across who ~gets~ it and can speak to the power of fandom without infantilizing those who engage in it. The history of fandom is absolutely fascinating and proves that almost all aspects of love, fixation, and devotion to an idea are universal (I.e., middle-aged women writing the equivalent of hate tweets to journalists in the 1940s). This was a delightful, uplifting, and deeply personal read. Thank you Kaitlyn Tiffany! I’ve never felt quite so seen.

This book is about one direction

I’m not a one direction fan so this book was kind of boring to me. This book is well written, but definitely improperly marketed.

Informative and compelling

Learned a lot about fandom I never knew or considered (despite having participated in fandom online actively since I was 9!)

It's a One Direction book

If you aren't a fan of One Direction you probably won't enjoy this book. I was so excited about the concept of the book, in theory it's a book that's basically made for me. But I never listened to One Direction, so the book didn't resonate with me at all and I had to return it