'Moderation' explores the ways humans reveal their true selves

Every once in a while here on The Show, we choose a recently-published book and invite an avid reader from the community to come on and talk about it with us.

For this installment, The Show spoke with Arizona State University grad Savhanna Freeman about the novel “Moderation,” by Elaine Castillo.

“Moderation” explores the inner and outer lives of a content moderator named Girlie Delmundo. Girlie works at a cutting-edge social media company that builds immersive online worlds — think Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, but even more lifelike.

Girlie spends her days rooting out the most vile and upsetting behavior of users on the platform — and she’s incredibly good at her job. Her ability to keep her emotions at bay as she deals with this sort of thing becomes a cornerstone of the plot, as she begins to develop intense feelings for William, one of the company’s senior employees. Soon enough, Girlie and William find themselves locked in a tense stand-off about where and when humans are truly safe to reveal their true selves.

"Moderation" was named one of the best books of 2025 by The New Yorker, Slate and Time magazine. The conversation began by discussing what Castillo was after in telling this story.

Full conversation

SAVHANNA FREEMAN: So I think like what she's really after is trying to create this story that kind of blends a lot of different like narratives and genres and overall trying to tell the story of two people who are very sure of themselves and who they are and how that kind of changes throughout the book and to really show like change in a person, especially like later on in their life or like not a classic like young adult fiction novel to really just like emphasize the amount of change that we go to at every stage of.

SAM DINGMAN: That is a very interesting answer because I listened to an interview with Elaine where she was asked a sort of a similar question. One of the things that she said is she was sort of fed up with romantic comedy stories, which I guess implies that she's, I mean, this is a funny book in some moments, although the comedy's sort of bleak.

But she said, particularly with regard to Girlie's character, something that had always frustrated her was that a lot of times female characters in romantic stories had what seemed to her like sort of frivolous jobs, like they worked at fashion magazines or they worked in PR. Not that those aren't serious jobs, but Girlie's job in this book is much more serious than that. She's watching these very traumatic videos that get posted on social media.

So as a way of illustrating how Elaine gets at some of this, I believe you have a passage that you have selected.

FREEMAN: The passage is:

"When people asked where she was from, she said she lived in Vegas. In the end, she knew they'd never been meant to thrive. Not there, maybe not anywhere. They'd long ago been mutated. That was the capital F fact. Remade lifetimes and lifetimes ago to be forever tourists just passing through. Lifted by the dominion of centuries to live always just an inch off the ground, so no root ever stuck and no foundation went unshaken. Maybe it was because of this that she was more inured to such losses and indignities. Maybe it was because of this that she bore such daily disasters with self-persevering and passivity that made her, in the end, so good at her job."

DINGMAN: OK, so that bit at the end about the degree to which she is able to bear these horrific things, that for me gets at what I felt most struck by as something that Elaine was after in this book.

Which is, I took it as a story about a survivor of specifically sexual trauma and the way that that experience makes some people able to, and in some cases even want to, sit with the most horrific things imaginable. and not blink. Whether that means going into like human rights work, what Girlie is doing in this story, which is content moderation for really extreme videos that get posted on social media, in her case, often depicting sexual content involving minors. which is stomach turning.

As is alluded to in that passage that you just read, she has this ability to do that and not flinch or blink. It doesn't even seem, at least in the early parts of the book, that she's affected by it very much. And then on top of that, Elaine writes these very unsparing descriptions of the videos that Girlie has to watch. What did you make of those sequences?

FREEMAN: I know when I first started reading it, I had to take a second.

DINGMAN: Me too, me too.

FREEMAN: Because it was so different from the other books that I was reading where I was like, OK, what am I getting myself into? But the more I really thought about it, and the more that you go through the story, you realize how important it is, both in the story itself, but also just in the conversation of how we handle and tackle like using the internet.

DINGMAN: I'm really glad that you brought up the relationship to things on the internet piece of this, because I was reading this book in the days following the Charlie Kirk assassination, and one of the things I was thinking about as we are introduced to Girlie's world in the way that we were just talking about is the speed with which the extremely graphic video of the moment that he was shot just popped up in people's social media feeds without warning, and there was almost no way to choose not to watch it if you are even a little bit online. If it was just presented to you and now that's something that you have seen.

FREEMAN: Yeah, no, and I think especially just with the landscape of social media and the dual ability to both inform people, which I think is one of the greatest treasures that we've had through the internet, is the connection of people, especially in different countries and different situations. With that, you also get the truth behind it, which is a lot of graphic imagery.

DINGMAN: So far, we've been talking about some of the very heady elements of the book, but as you were alluding to at the beginning, there's also this really rich, interesting love story that's happening.

FREEMAN: Yeah.

DINGMAN: This makes me think of one of my favorite passages that I would love to get your response to, 'cause in addition to that desire that they so clearly have for each other, something I appreciated in this book that I think is rare to see is the way that she wrote about William's love for his best male friend, who is one of the co-founders of the company that they both work at, and who died by suicide.

And William very clearly loved this person, not in a romantic way, just in a friend way. And one of the things that I think is really nice about the way their relationship develops is before anything happens between the two of them, Girlie helps William make friends with that idea that he loved this other character.

There's this one moment where they're sitting and talking to each other, and Girlie asks William if he loved this character, who was his best friend. And William says, I'm quoting now from the book:

“'He was my best friend. He cleared his throat. So, yes, I suppose I loved him.'

'That's nice,' she said.

William blinked. Loving someone, having a best friend, she clarified. It's not nothing. It's not nothing, he agreed."

I love that moment so much because you can see that it is so difficult for him to let himself call this feeling love.

FREEMAN: Yeah, definitely. No, and I think with that as well, like we talk about like the idea of haunting a narrative. I think throughout, you really do get to have these pockets where you're able to see the things that William went through and how that makes that moment so important where they're having a time together and they're really trying to, I guess, like break through those layers, even if it's unintentionally and having a nice moment together where you're able to see sort of the shift in both the characters where he's able to have that comfort in knowing that despite everything that happened, that he does have love for him.

DINGMAN: Let's talk for just a moment about some things that maybe didn't work as well in terms of what Elaine was after. What for you didn't quite get there?

FREEMAN: I think there definitely could have been a little bit more even spacing towards the end of each of these moments because you kind of lose that element of intimacy with these descriptive scenes and settings that are happening. So yeah, I kind of just wish there was a little bit more. I wish she would have like really dove into more of the end plots.

DINGMAN: I agree with you completely, and I'm glad you brought this up, because I had this feeling towards the climax of the book, it is revealed, in my opinion, very suddenly that there was a lot of shady stuff going on at this tech company that they both work at, and a bunch of people get busted for embezzlement and other things that they were doing, and all of that is revealed in the course of a pretty small number of pages, basically in like a really long monologue that reminded me of one of those murder mysteries where the detective walks in at the end and goes, "Here's how I figured it out."

And they just kind of lay it all out and it's like, I didn't really see a lot of seeds about this planted and it's very complicated and feels a little bit convenient. And it was in such contrast to the things that, to your point, work so well.

There's this very long scene where it's just Girlie and William sitting at a table eating french fries together. That's one of my favorite scenes I've ever read in a book. They're just little, that's where the "I loved him" scene happens, if memory serves, and it's just these little teeny details about each other that are getting revealed with each bite of french fry. There's so few words, but so much meaning. That could have been the whole book as far as I'm concerned.

FREEMAN: Seriously. I think that says a lot to like just the specificity that you see throughout the whole novel and how in relation to Girlie looking at William and initially having all of these sort of judgments and really you get to see like through the eyes of Girlie all these different sort of like preconceived notions that she's putting on other people as kind of a defense mechanism for herself and how she's able to sort of like piece herself into the world around her.

And I think using that level of detail throughout really just allows the reader to fully understand not only the area that she's in, like where she is emotionally, where she is in her career, but how she wants to fit her narrative and how that then goes into her love story with William and how she's able to sort of like break those molds and have those really intimate moments with like something as simple as sharing fries together.