“It’s my first interview,” says Honor Levy, while vaping. Discussing her first book—titled My First Book, which will be published next week by Penguin Press—she lets me know that she actually quit vaping. “I needed something to calm me down,” the 26-year-old explains.
I first met Levy, who currently lives in Los Angeles, at a friend’s apartment-warming, in Manhattan, in 2020. At the start of the pandemic, Levy moved to New York while finishing her last semester at Bennington College, where she studied theater and playwriting. In person, she was like a blur, not only because she was in constant motion, circling the room, but because, in conversations, her opinions were adamantly unformed, bouncing from provocation to apologia.
During the pandemic lockdown, Levy’s presence felt inescapable in downtown New York. She was an It Girl at the center of a burgeoning scene known as Dimes Square, a niche, cultural-criticism-minded milieu named after a small corner of Chinatown. One could run into Levy, who worked for the artist Jon Rafman, at a downtown bistro’s best sidewalk table or hosting an exclusive town-house party for a Web3 tech company’s literary magazine.
Mostly, though, she could be found online—TikTok, Discord, Substack—honing her infectious, dizzying voice. Take, for example, a July 2021 Instagram diatribe (affected by vaccine-induced delirium, she says) that went semi-viral. “What the actual hell is a reading?” she says in the video, responding to posts made by her friends at a literary event. “Like, no, for real. [I’m] obviously so hurt I wasn’t invited to something that now I have to, like, take down the whole idea of it even existing.”
Now she has a book of 16 short stories to promote, a plan that involves her own readings. There will be one at New York’s McNally Jackson Books Seaport, on May 14, and another at Los Angeles’s Stories Books & Café, on May 17.
An earlier version of My First Book was due out three years ago from Levy’s dream publisher, Tyrant Books, which was known for discovering fringe writers such as Atticus Lish and Nico Walker. But on March 30, 2021, Tyrant’s founder, Giancarlo DiTrapano, accidentally overdosed and died at 47. DiTrapano’s New York Times obituary mentions Levy as a writer “he believed marked the arrival of the first wave of Gen Z literary voices.” She was contacted by agents right away.
If you were following Levy online in 2021, it seemed that the pressure of writing a generation-defining book was getting to her. On a podcast that July, Levy, who had published short stories in The New Yorker and New York Tyrant, said she wasn’t sure if she identified as a writer anymore, mentioning that because both her roommate and her then boyfriend were (yet unpublished) “brilliant novelists,” she no longer needed to take on that mantle.
Levy, who comes from a Jewish family, converted to Catholicism, a change she credits to that “brilliant” boyfriend. On her own podcast, Wet Brain, which ran from July 2021 to November 2022, Levy often talked about religion with her newly Christian co-host, Walter Pearce, a modeling agent from Manhattan. But even if Levy was, to some, the face of Dimes Square’s “trad-Cath” trend, she appeared, to me at least, willfully lost, taking on an Alice role within the Wonderland of Trump’s coronavirus-era chaos.
By her second year of living in New York, “I just stopped being curious about things,” says Levy. “That’s a big and scary thing. When you’re writing, you have to be curious.” Then “something in me just snapped. I got really annoyed. I’m the annoying one—I don’t get annoyed.” I gather it was at her own influence within the Dimes Square scene, an ardently self-mythologizing microcosm.
“I was trying to write and edit in a serious way, but I would say things out loud that really only made sense to the people I was saying them to,” explains Levy. “It was like a mirror looking in a mirror looking in a mirror.” So she moved to Los Angeles, where she grew up, “fell in love—not with the city, with a person,” and partially retreated from online life.
While Levy’s book starts with a quote from C. S. Lewis, it isn’t preachy as much as it is a rationale for the strange habits of people online, and for the motivation to test limits on the Internet. As she writes in “Z Was for Zoomer,” “Trolling (the practice, in cute times) takes one back to a childlike sense of wonder.”
The characters in My First Book are driven by an impulse to self-promote paired with the shame of self-promotion’s implications—a decidedly Gen Z sentiment, stemming from the over-awareness of manufactured influence. They waffle between feigning obliviousness, humming happily along like the cartoon characters in the memes they reference, and confronting the realities of online personhood, knowing that only the most egregious, intense, and extreme ideas get attention.
The cover of My First Book, as well as the title pages for the stories, are decorated with doodles made from keyboard characters familiar to former AIM or chat-room users. Web addresses listed in page breaks will lead to a series of live annotations, I’m told.
I ask if Levy will be more online again once the book is out. She still has “like five Instagram accounts,” but she’s “just consuming content now instead of making it.” It’s “terrible, but also maybe a good exercise in being more careful with my own ideas.”
Natasha Stagg is a New York–based writer
