Nichols shows us how pitiful: very. Written in the form of one preposterously long blog comment, the novel is the story of what we soon realize is a lifelong series of obsessions. Narrator lynksys181 has formed a fixation on a stranger whom he first spied in the background of a politician's press photo. She so resembled the woman he loved back in college that he believed she was his second chance at love. (He flubbed it badly, and weirdly, the first time.) So he tracks this stranger down - we're given the image of a person with very little to do besides plumb the Internet for the information and interactions he craves - and begins making contact via comments on her wedding blog.