Lev Grossman compared it with another 2009 novel – "The Song Is You" by Arthur Phillips – and called it "an example of what you might call iPod lit...novels that meditate on the paradoxical mixture of intimacy and estrangement that arises from listening to digitally recorded music, or really from any human interaction mediated by the Internet." He concludes "this is a novel about people who have wasted massive chunks of their lives – Duncan in sterile rock-critic hermeneutics (he's like the worst-case-scenario future of Rob Fleming from "High Fidelity"); Annie in a dead romance and a dead-end job; and Crowe in sulky, creatively arid seclusion. They're trying to make the best of what's left, but what's left just isn't that great. "Juliet, Naked" is a bleaker book than Hornby's "A Long Way Down", and that was about four people trying to kill themselves." It was announced in December 2014 that the novel would be adapted into a film helmed by regular "Girls" director Jesse Peretz and produced by Judd Apatow, with Kate Winslet attached to star. In October 2016, Ethan Hawke, Rose Byrne and Chris O'Dowd were cast in the film adaptation. The film was released in 2018.