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A question I get asked sometimes: out of everything you've written, what's your favorite?

I always say Petshitter: A Silicon Valley Romance. I always watch people try to decide if I'm serious.

I'm serious.

It does something structurally that I hadn't seen done before: it runs a manifesto — the actual Unabomber manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future — as chapter epigraphs through a romantic comedy about two people whose names have destroyed their lives. The comedy is load-bearing. The romance is genuine. The manifesto is the argument. By the end of the book you've read all three simultaneously and they've done something to each other.

The protagonist shares a name with Ted Kaczynski. His entire adult life has been shaped by this. Not metaphorically — professionally, socially, specifically. He's 48 and still waiting for a break that keeps not coming when he meets a woman on a blind date. She also has an impossible name. Their recognition of each other is immediate and completely earned.

What they build together — nominally a dog waste startup, actually a mesh-networked alternative internet designed to dismantle surveillance capitalism — is where the book's real ambitions live. But the love story is the reason it works. You need to believe in them to believe in what they're building.

I think it's my favorite because it's the book where the formal ambition and the emotional core lined up exactly. That doesn't happen every time. When it does, you know it.

Petshitter: A Silicon Valley Romance — on Amazon now.