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What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?”
She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.
Levy was one of the niche icons of Dimes Square, the scene that bloomed on the little patch of the Lower East Side where we are currently drinking Diet Cokes. During the pandemic, it was synonymous with a squad of smart if somewhat bratty young people with vaguely anti-woke artistic ambitions. Their provocations can seem a little beyond their sell-by dates today.
We’d originally planned on having lunch, but she is, I guess, too wound up, telling me in a baby voice, “Every time I eat, I get really sweepy,” followed by a girlish giggle. She’s dressed in a blue-and-brown-striped rugby shirt and an orange velvet skirt that doesn’t quite match, and I notice her fingernails are bloody (she bites them). On her arm, she has a tattoo of the Apple Notes app; she uses it to jot down her thoughts and feelings, some of which make it into her short stories. Though we’ve known each other for a couple of years, she is clearly not relaxed. I don’t think she ever is. “Tell me if this is getting boring,” she says at one point. “You can leave.” This was the beginning of a six-hour hangout.
Levy is rarely boring. She talks incredibly fast and doesn’t finish most of her thoughts but is a fabulous conversationalist anyway because sometimes she says something that might not make any sense if you stop to think about it, but she does it with so much manic bluster you can’t help but nod along. Like “TikTok is a psychological-warfare weapon invented by China” or “If I was a guy, I’d probably be an incel or an evil gay.” Sometimes, it just sounds like Adderall-inflected slam poetry: “I make the algorithm, the algorithm makes me.” She calls this her “yap mode.”
Levy was featured in Ben Smith’s 2021 New York Times column about Dimes Square, in which she yapped about her fondness for the word retarded and wanting to be Andy Warhol (as opposed to Valerie Solanas). She became the vaping poster girl for the scene’s reactionary sensibilities: its fondness for Catholicism (“New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” the Times wrote in 2022) and possible Trumpiness (Vanity Fair quoted Levy describing MAGA hats as a downtown “accessory” the same year). She became friendly with a controversial crew of characters, including podcaster and actor Dasha Nekrasova and the notorious influencer Caroline Calloway (“You’re one of the great minds,” she once told Levy in my presence). On her own now-dormant podcast, Wet Brain, she and her co-host, Walter Pearce, interviewed the alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin.
She is happy to offend you. There’s also a decent chance that this book will prove she is out to do something more interesting than that. Kirkus called it “oddly exquisite”; Dwight Garner gave the book a generally positive review in the Times (“young, cool, coddled and raised on the internet”). I was sent an advance copy and found it often quite adept at capturing our generation — there are lots of meme references, emojispeak, and a 54-page encyclopedia of zoomer lingo — without falling into blasé nihilism. At the very least, I thought I would reread it in a couple of decades and look back at this time with some mix of delight and cringe. The publisher asked me to blurb it, and I gave a not very original compliment that Levy is “a voice my generation can be proud of.”
There’s that VOG thing again.
Levy grew up in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. Her mother is a celebrity makeup artist (with clients including Tracee Ellis Ross and Olivia Wilde), and her father directed B movies in the ’90s with titles like Midnight Tease and Time Under Fire. They sent her to a French-immersion high school and, during the summers, the Rock N Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon. She tells me she had both “emotional issues” and “dental issues” as a kid.
She read a lot; became obsessed with Bret Easton Ellis, the also-privileged, not-so-PC, pop-culture-obsessed VOG of Gen X; and even attended his alma mater, Bennington. “It was a place of self-mythology,” she says, that prepared her well for Dimes Square. When she was a sophomore, she tweeted aspirationally that she was writing a novel for indie publisher Tyrant Books; its editor, Giancarlo DiTrapano, impressed with her gall, messaged Levy asking if she had anything worth publishing. She said “yes,” then went to the library, opened a Google Doc, titled it My First Book, and began writing.
One of her first stories, “Good Boys,” was published on The New Yorker’s website in July 2020. It is set at a study-abroad program in Paris, and the narrator is considering what it means to be desirable to boys her age. “The boys are calling girls dogs,” Levy writes. “Dogs want to be held after sex, to be petted, to be taken care of. Dogs make a big deal when you get them pregnant.” The story, she says now, “legitimized me in an early and not undeserved way.”
“The personal is not really political for me,” Levy insists. “I guess that’s my privilege.” One story in her new book, “Cancel Me,” from May 2020, is about a young woman who feels sorry for her guy friends who have been Me Too’d; another is told from the point of view of a boy whose hookup is getting an abortion (“She downloaded an app and told me it was the size of a fig … A forgivable fig with fingernails”). She tells me that she reads lots of mass-shooting manifestos and jokes that incel should be included in the LGBTQ+ acronym.
DiTrapano died in 2021 while Levy was still finishing the book. (She wryly notes that the character Hannah Horvath, on Girls, also loses her editor.) Literary agents and book editors soon vultured up Sean Thor Conroe’s novel, Fuccboi, and Gabriel Smith’s Brat. My First Book was picked up by Penguin Press. It has been in the works for almost four years now, and Levy blames the Adderall shortage in part for the delay. “Every short story I’d ever written is in this book,” she tells me. “I had nothing else. Isn’t that scary?” (The Times review noted, “The falloff is steep between this book’s best stories and its lesser ones.”)
In November, Levy moved back to L.A. “I started cringing at things in New York and becoming sort of a hater. The more you see yourself in other people, the more you hate them,” she says, and it’s true that she has inspired some imitators. She seems a bit tortured over the question of whether her fraternizing in Dimes Square meant anything. “For a while, New York really felt like the center of the universe and that I was … in it,” she tells me. “But I don’t know.”
After Corner Bar, we wander around the neighborhood, gossiping about our mutual friends and rivals. Eventually, we end up at 169 Bar to drink. “This place has changed,” she says mock wistfully. “No, I’m just kidding.” Then again, more earnestly, “This place has changed.”
But has she? “I read my book and I’m like, This is a girl book. This is a girl who calls herself a girl when she should be a woman,” she says. “As you get older, hopefully your morals crystallize. You can’t be getting fucked in the head-pussy all the time.”
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Brock Colyar , 2024-05-03 14:00:25
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