If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You

A disillusioned millennial and a fragile young actress uncover the secrets of a decaying Hollywood mansion--a manifestation of the anxieties, obsessions, and fears of our digital era--in this wickedly entertaining novel about the eerie ways the internet haunts us, from the acclaimed author of Self Care.

Enter Dayna: A thirty-nine-year-old unemployed rabbit owner whose boyfriend dumps her in a Reddit post. Out of options, she accepts an unusual opportunity from a man she stopped speaking to twenty years ago. If Dayna can transform Craig's crumbling mansion--now home to a motley crew of college dropouts with big dreams--into a successful hype house, he can restore his birthright to its former glory . . . and she can resurrect her career from the dead.

Enter Olivia: A fresh-faced nineteen-year-old actress with a guilty conscience and a gift for crying on camera. She arrives at the house looking for the one person who can grant her absolution: Becca, an enigmatic tarot card influencer who built a fandom with her cryptic, soul-touching readings . . . and then vanished.

By getting up close and personal with the generation coming to replace her, Dayna begins to build a social media campaign around Becca's disappearance that will catapult the creators to new heights of success, but Craig forbids her from pursuing the mystery. As Olivia searches for traces of Becca in a labyrinthine house that seems intent on hiding its secrets from her, and Dayna becomes entangled with both Craig and Jake, the resident heartthrob and the last person to see Becca, the two women discover clues in the house's hallways that upend everything--and lead to a shocking discovery.

The internet: You may think you're inhabiting it, but is it really inhabiting you? If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You is an audacious social comedy and unnerving gothic mystery from one of our most acclaimed satirists and "a great demolition expert of the influencer era" (The New Republic).

Author: Leigh Stein
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 08/26/2025
Pages: 316
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
ISBN: 9780593983645

About the Author
Leigh Stein is the author of six books, including the critically acclaimed satirical novel Self Care, and the creator of the Attention Economy newsletter on Substack. She has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Allure, ELLE, Airmail, and The Cut.