Joshua Mohr‘s ‘All This Life’ looks at life’s digital realities

On March 9, just a couple of days before a scheduled heart surgery, writer Joshua Mohr sent out a tweet.

“The surgery was a success and here is my new and improved heart!” That tweet, which was favorited 40 times, linked to a photo of an ultrasound of his heart that he’d posted on Instagram.

Every minute, 6,000 tweets are dispatched, and, in any given month, Facebook logs almost 1.5 billion active users.

In his most recent novel, “All This Life,” Mohr spends nearly 300 pages turning these questions over and over, probing at the realities of our digital lives.

“I’m interested in the intimate collisions and ripple effects of seemingly innocuous meetings,” says Mohr. 39.

[...] on a more existential level, they’re all connected by a universal struggle with their relationship to technology.

There’s a father who seems to lose his son to the Internet, the young woman whose sex tape goes viral, the brother who, thanks to YouTube, watches his sister’s suicide on literal repeat, and the single mother who invites danger into her life by way of Craigslist.

“The book certainly starts off with lots of danger points to lure the reader deeper into the story,” Mohr says.

In the past, Mohr says, he’s tried to distance his book from technology, from the obvious signs at any given time.

“The cool thing about ensemble storytelling is it allows me to use different characters to talk about things I struggle with,” he says.

There’s a small reference, the sort a reader might not even remember after they’ve moved on to the next book, about the son chipping his tooth when he was younger.

Characters screw up, and even as they atone, you never get the feeling they’ll stop struggling, not forever.

Mohr comes back to the idea of scars a few times throughout the book — the scars a breast cancer survivor has covered up with tattoos, the scars on the Golden Gate Bridge that constantly have to be repainted.

“There’s so many examples of people starting to just produce this bourgeois, boring stuff that I call ‘Beige Against the Machine,’” Mohr says.