Honor Levy in ‘New York’ Magazine Interview, ‘My First Book’ and Politics
honor tax, 26, backlit on the Zoom screen by midday California sunlight. A teddy bear is placed behind her. She was wearing an oversized black t-shirt, she showed me the words “Unstoppable, unstoppable”. She no longer vapes, she said as she leaned over to do something “disgusting” with the Lucy nicotine bag, not entirely out of view of her computer camera. This was millennia ago. At the beginning of May. The day before Levy, whose Instagram handle is @victim0_o, became the subject of criticism in a particular corner of the Internet.
Before that, she was a child growing up in Los Angeles. She attended Bennington College because she loved it Donna Tartt‘S Secret history, And Bret Easton Ellis, and thought Vermont was one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. NY Tyrant published one of her books short story just over a week before she graduated from college; The New Yorker publish her flash fiction the following July. She somersaulted about 190 miles south, into downtown Manhattan Dimes Square and pages of The New York Times.
She has amassed a collection of other Instagram accounts: @abuser0_o, @survivor0_o, @accuser0_o, @enabler0_o, @martyr0_o, @witness0_o. She had planned to publish a book with Tyrant Books, but then its founder, Giancarlo DiTrapano, die. She has converted according to Catholicism and is quoted in some further detail, including in this magazinein which she talks about her friendliness with the New Right leader Curtis Yarvin and (purely hypothetical) stability with receipt of funds Peter Thiel. She co-hosted and then went on hiatus from a podcast called Wet brain, For a total of 35 hours, she called friends and acquaintances; raising Discord, visiting Roosevelt Island with her father and a white supremacist dog whistle; and say things like, “Jesus died so I could have a baby before marriage!” Her agent then sold her book to Penguin Press. In 2023, after seven years on the East Coast and a bad breakup, she moves back to LA, to her new boyfriend’s apartment in the “flats” of Beverly Hills. “It’s 90212,” she said, “so I have to keep grinding.”
Tomorrow, My first book, Her first book appeared. That’s the reason for that interview IN New York The Cut magazine, which was the catalyst for the next wave of the Internet. “It’s boring when someone in New York interviews their friends about their first book and writes about how they are the voice of their generation, again, because they write in the language update-alt-lit-internet,” one person declared; another called it “an accidental hit.” (Brock Colyar, Cut writer, had blurred Levy’s book, called it “fantastic.”) Others didn’t like the fact that Levy’s mother was a makeup artist in Hollywood, although they quite liked the fact that her father directed a series of B-movies in the 1990s. 1990. Someone expressed confusion: Wasn’t she openly racist? Some people say 26 year olds shouldn’t write memoirs. (Her only book is a collection of short stories.)
Many people are not happy with this quote in New York Times review:
He’s giving away the knight-errant, organ-eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She’s giving the damsel in distress, Haplogroup K. He’s in the fall of Rome. She is serving the sixth and final mass extinction. His face is a marble statue. Her face is that of an anime waifu. They curled into each other.
Taste is subjective, but this, surely we can agree, is funny, is ironic.
Our conversation evoked the confusing reference experience of browsing on social media platforms. During our first 90 minutes of Zoom, she covers: Kathy Acker, HP Lovecraft, Dostoevsky, Stephenie Meyer, Eva Babitz, Dave Chappelle, Joan Didion, Yarvin, Robert Anton Wilson, Roberto Bolaño, Bronze Age Pervert, Cookie Mueller, Norman Mailer, Terence McKenna. Bloomsbury Group and Algonquin Round Table. Rookie magazine.
She describes her collection as “a copy of a copy” and some of the stories in it as “extremely banal,” but that view may be influenced by Dwight Garnerher review, she told me she didn’t even read what was in it. She said of the book, “I wish I could have done it better.”
But when stories work well—and they often do—they capture the fractured sense of existing as a body in the physical world but also as a brain online. They evoke loneliness and confusion. They reveal the gap between who their character wants to be, how people perceive them, and who they are.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vanity Fair: When I read this book, I did the terrible thing of pairing the narrator with you, and—
