Dimes Square Stalwart Honor Levy on ‘My First Book’

What’s a voice of a technology?” Honor Levy asks me at Nook Bar on Canal Avenue. “Is it essentially the most controversial voice? The primary particular person to jot down in the way in which that everyone writes? The person who most individuals hate or love?”

She’s not fairly positive she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with canine), although, as a 26-year-old author with numerous hype round her first ebook, titled My First E book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington School, she is aware of that’s a part of the rationale folks would possibly learn (and write about) her.

Levy was one of many area of interest icons of Dimes Sq., the scene that bloomed on the little patch of the Decrease East Facet the place we’re presently ingesting Eating regimen Cokes. In the course of the pandemic, it was synonymous with a squad of sensible if considerably bratty younger folks with vaguely anti-woke inventive ambitions. Their provocations can appear somewhat past their sell-by dates immediately.

We’d initially deliberate on having lunch, however she is, I assume, too wound up, telling me in a child voice, “Each time I eat, I get actually sweepy,” adopted by a girlish giggle. She’s wearing a blue-and-brown-striped rugby shirt and an orange velvet skirt that doesn’t fairly match, and I discover her fingernails are bloody (she bites them). On her arm, she has a tattoo of the Apple Notes app; she makes use of it to jot down her ideas and emotions, a few of which make it into her quick tales. Although we’ve recognized one another for a few years, she is clearly not relaxed. I don’t assume she ever is. “Inform me if that is getting boring,” she says at one level. “You may go away.” This was the start of a six-hour hangout.

Levy isn’t boring. She talks extremely quick and doesn’t end most of her ideas however is a superb conversationalist anyway as a result of typically she says one thing that may not make any sense if you happen to cease to consider it, however she does it with a lot manic bluster you’ll be able to’t assist however nod alongside. Like “TikTok is a psychological-warfare weapon invented by China” or “If I used to be a man, I’d in all probability be an incel or an evil homosexual.” Typically, it simply appears 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 Occasions column about Dimes Sq., during which she yapped about her fondness for the phrase retarded and eager to be Andy Warhol (versus Valerie Solanas). She turned the vaping poster woman for the scene’s reactionary sensibilities: its fondness for Catholicism (“New York’s Hottest Membership Is the Catholic Church,” the Occasions wrote in 2022) and potential Trumpiness (Vainness Truthful quoted Levy describing MAGA hats as a downtown “accent” the identical yr). She turned pleasant with a controversial crew of characters, together with podcaster and actor Dasha Nekrasova and the infamous influencer Caroline Calloway (“You’re one of many nice minds,” she as soon as informed Levy in my presence). On her personal now-dormant podcast, Moist Mind, she and her co-host, Walter Pearce, interviewed the alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin.

She is glad to offend you. There’s additionally an honest probability that this ebook will show she is out to do one thing extra fascinating than that. Kirkus referred to as it “oddly beautiful”; Dwight Garner gave the ebook a usually constructive evaluation within the Occasions (“younger, cool, coddled and raised on the web”). I used to be despatched an advance copy and located it usually fairly adept at capturing our technology — there are many meme references, emojispeak, and a 54-page encyclopedia of zoomer lingo — with out falling into blasé nihilism. On the very least, I believed I’d reread it in a few a long time and look again right now with some combine of enjoyment and cringe. The writer requested me to blurb it, and I gave a not very authentic praise that Levy is “a voice my technology will be pleased with.”

There’s that VOG factor once more.

Levy grew up in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. Her mom is a star make-up artist (with purchasers together with Tracee Ellis Ross and Olivia Wilde), and her father directed B motion pictures within the ’90s with titles like Midnight Tease and Time Underneath Fireplace. They despatched her to a French-immersion highschool and, in the course of the summers, the Rock N Roll Camp for Ladies in Portland, Oregon. She tells me she had each “emotional points” and “dental points” as a child.

She learn loads; turned obsessive about 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 spot of self-mythology,” she says, that ready her effectively for Dimes Sq.. When she was a sophomore, she tweeted aspirationally that she was writing a novel for indie writer Tyrant Books; its editor, Giancarlo DiTrapano, impressed along with her gall, messaged Levy asking if she had something value publishing. She mentioned “sure,” then went to the library, opened a Google Doc, titled it My First E book, and commenced writing.

One in every of her first tales, “Good Boys,” was revealed on The New Yorker’s web site in July 2020. It’s set at a study-abroad program in Paris, and the narrator is contemplating what it means to be fascinating to boys her age. “The boys are calling women canine,” Levy writes. “Canine need to be held after intercourse, to be petted, to be taken care of. Canine make an enormous deal if you get them pregnant.” The story, she says now, “legitimized me in an early and never undeserved approach.”

“The non-public is just not actually political for me,” Levy insists. “I assume that’s my privilege.” One story in her new ebook, “Cancel Me,” from Could 2020, is a few younger girl who feels sorry for her man pals who’ve been Me Too’d; one other is informed from the viewpoint of a boy whose hookup is getting an abortion (“She downloaded an app and informed me it was the scale of a fig … A forgivable fig with fingernails”). She tells me that she reads a lot of mass-shooting manifestos and jokes that incel needs to be included within the LGBTQ+ acronym.

DiTrapano died in 2021 whereas Levy was nonetheless ending the ebook. (She wryly notes that the character Hannah Horvath, on Ladies, additionally loses her editor.) Literary brokers and ebook editors quickly vultured up Sean Thor Conroe’s novel, Fuccboi, and Gabriel Smith’s Brat. My First E book was picked up by Penguin Press. It has been within the works for nearly 4 years now, and Levy blames the Adderall scarcity partly for the delay. “Each quick story I’d ever written is on this ebook,” she tells me. “I had nothing else. Isn’t that scary?” (The Occasions evaluation famous, “The falloff is steep between this ebook’s finest tales and its lesser ones.”)

In November, Levy moved again to L.A. “I began cringing at issues in New York and changing into type of a hater. The extra you see your self in different folks, the extra you hate them,” she says, and it’s true that she has impressed some imitators. She appears a bit tortured over the query of whether or not her fraternizing in Dimes Sq. meant something. “For some time, New York actually felt like the middle of the universe and that I used to be … in it,” she tells me. “However I don’t know.”

After Nook Bar, we wander across the neighborhood, gossiping about our mutual pals and rivals. Finally, we find yourself at 169 Bar to drink. “This place has modified,” she says mock wistfully. “No, I’m simply kidding.” Then once more, extra earnestly, “This place has modified.”

However has she? “I learn my ebook and I’m like, It is a woman ebook. It is a woman who calls herself a lady when she needs to be a girl,” she says. “As you become older, hopefully your morals crystallize. You may’t be getting fucked within the head-pussy on a regular basis.”