Honor Levy, 26, is backlit on a Zoom display through the noon California solar. A teddy undergo is propped at the back of her. She’s dressed in an outsized dark T-shirt that, she displays me, reads “Undruggable Unshockable Unstoppable.” She not vapes, she says as she leans over to do one thing “disgusting” with a Lucy nicotine pouch, now not rather solely out of view of her pc digital camera. This used to be eons in the past. In the beginning of Would possibly. The month earlier than Levy, whose Instagram deal with is @victim0_o, become the topic of vitriol in a selected nook of the web.
Earlier than that, she used to be a kid rising up in Los Angeles. She attended Bennington School as a result of she beloved Donna Tartt’s The Mysterious Historical past, and Bret Easton Ellis, and concept Vermont used to be some of the stunning playgrounds she’d ever visible. NY Tyrant revealed certainly one of her snip tales simply over a while earlier than her faculty commencement; The Pristine Yorker revealed her flash myth refer to July. She tumbled about 190 miles south, into downtown Ny’s Dimes Sq. and the pages of The Pristine York Instances.
She accrued a selection of alternative Instagram handles: @abuser0_o, @survivor0_o, @accuser0_o, @enabler0_o, @martyr0_o, @witness0_o. She had plans to put up a secure with Tyrant Books, however after its founder, Giancarlo DiTrapano, died. She transformed to Catholicism and used to be quoted some extra, together with on this album, through which she spoke of her friendliness with Pristine Proper frontman Curtis Yarvin and an okay-ness (purely hypothetical) with accepting cash from Peter Thiel. She cohosted and after laid to residue a podcast referred to as Rainy Mind, on which, for a cumulative 35 hours, she rang up buddies and acquaintances; introduced up Discord, visiting Roosevelt Island together with her dad, and a white supremacist canine whistle; and stated such things as, “Jesus died for me to have premarital!” Next her agent offered her secure to Penguin Press. In 2023, upcoming seven years at the East Coast and one unholy breakup, she moved house to LA, into her fresh boyfriend’s rental in “the flat part” of Beverly Hills. “It’s 90212,” she says, “so I got to keep grinding.”
The next day, My First Keep, her first secure, comes out. Which used to be the cause of the interview in Pristine York album’s The Trim, which used to be the catalyst for the following web ire. “Very boring for somebody in the NY lit scene to interview their friend about their debut book and write about how they’re the voice of their generation, yet again, because they write in updated-alt-lit-internet-speak,” one particular person declared; any other referred to as it “an accidental hit piece.” (Brock Colyar, the Trim essayist, had blurbed Levy’s secure, calling it “brilliant.”) Others didn’t like that Levy’s mom is a Hollywood make-up artist, even though they more or less preferred that her father directed a slate of B motion pictures within the Nineties. Any person expressed unsureness: Wasn’t she brazenly racist? Any person stated that 26-year-olds shouldn’t incrible memoirs. (Her handiest secure is a snip tale assortment.)
Many took factor with this paragraph quoted within the Pristine York Instances evaluation:
He used to be giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She used to be giving damsel in misery, pill-popper pixie dream woman, Haplogroup Ok. He used to be in his fall of Rome occasion. She used to be serving 6th and ultimate cluster extinction realness. His face used to be a marble statue. Her face used to be an anime waifu. They scrolled into each and every alternative.
Style is subjective, however this, indubitably we will be able to agree, is humorous, is satire.
Our conversations evoke the discombobulating referential revel in of surfing on a social media platform. All the way through our first 90-minute Zoom, she mentions: Kathy Acker, H.P. Lovecraft, Dostoevsky, Stephenie Meyer, Eve Babitz, Dave Chappelle, Joan Didion, Yarvin, Robert Anton Wilson, Roberto Bolaño, Bronze Generation Pervert, Cookie Mueller, Norman Mailer, Terence McKenna. The Bloomsbury Workforce and the Algonquin Spherical Desk. Rookie magazine.
She describes her personal assortment as “a photocopy of a photocopy” and a few of its tales as “extremely mediocre,” however that sentiment could also be influenced through Dwight Garner’s evaluation, which she tells me she didn’t learn whilst she paraphrases what’s in it. She says, of the secure, “I wish I could have made it better.”
But if the tales are running smartly—they usually ceaselessly are—they seize the fractured sense of present as a frame within the bodily global, but additionally as a mind on-line. They evoke loneliness and unsureness. They expose the gulf between who their characters wish to be, how crowd see them, and who they’re.
This interview has been edited and condensed for readability.
Vainness Honest: When I used to be studying the secure, I used to be doing that unholy factor of conflating narrators with you, and—
