My First Book

by Honor Levy

I am not asking you to agree with me. In fact, I’d be happier if you didn’t. I am afraid of self-censorship in a place of supposed radicalism like a liberal arts school because I am afraid that one day we will all be too afraid of being wrong.’

We grew up on the internet, or the Internet, as it was originally known – a proper noun, a place to visit and explore, before we claimed it as everybody’s, turning it into a place where we pay bills, shop, fall in love, where kids get past parental controls to come of age. Honor Levy lends her experience to the narrators of these propulsive, provocative and pill-fuelled dispatches, speaking to the malleable reality we all inhabit, where clicks, codes, unreliable words and memes shape identities, personas and reputations.

In My First Book, Honor Levy endeavors to contextualize Gen-Z, a generation of young people desperate to discern what matters in a world that paints every event as a catastrophe. Irony is the salve of choice, and Levy deploys it masterfully. She paints the chasm in understanding between her parents’ generation and the Zoomer reality overloaded with niche signs and meanings.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Essays, Coming Of Age, Literature

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2024

Reviews

[autotelics · Rating 2 out of 5]

a glimpse into a deeply uninteresting mind. crazy how easily the most intellectually incurious people are convinced of their own brilliance.

[alexis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty typical upper middle class college-educated party girl cokehead personal essays, except she uses 4chan and it’s adderall instead of coke. Tedious, banal, repetitive, although a couple stories DID border on that Call of Duty/Thirty Seconds to Mars e-girl edit where it’s the streamer dressed as Mabel Pines ranting about how the planet is dying and the animals are leaving(???) and then The Kill starts playing over someone’s CoD killcam montage.

[Marissa Cooper · Rating 1 out of 5]

“Dimes Square falls under this thing where it’s like, well, what’s the export? What’s the book, what’s the band?" - Jack Antonoff

Lena Dunham's ex boyfriend asked, and Honor Levy delivered with this shabby little endeavor of unclear purpose.

The experience of reading My First Book is like skimming the comments on an Instagram Reel while half-listening to the most annoying kid you ever nannied yammer about drama at her private middle school. It's like that one Chris Fleming bit about teens who drink coffee, peppered with alt right ecoglossalia.

Critics at legacy publications have been overly generous in their reviews of this mishegoss, perhaps because the work is too feeble to inspire a satisfying pan.

There are no real ideas to engage with here, not even bad ones, just regurgitated memes delivered with the bogus bathos of an Adderall high.

Dime's up.

[Dani Pergola · Rating 1 out of 5]

"...in our homemade cyber echo chambers, to lean toward the right has become an act of radicalism."

I typically enjoy hate-reading books but I'm genuinely annoyed that I wasted my time on this. We get it, you think you're like if Patricia Lockwood was a Red Scare girl. You're rich and you love hanging out with sex pests. The short stories had no compelling characters, no distinct narratives, and all blended together. It was torturous to get through. I'm shocked this book was picked up by a publisher. Don't let the high profile blurbs fool you (her parents probably paid for them).

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎]

it affected me the way 'open mic night' affects me, on those nights when everyone who gets the urge to perform is in the throes of a marijuana giggle-fit, and has never read (or written) a poem before, and there are always, always ever-so-many people in the audience who give standing ovations at those sorts of open mic nights, and so this is not necessarily a bad review, in the strictest sense of the term.

[michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gen z depressioncore for the LA/NY cool kids

Not every story is a gem (it can get a bit repetitive/rambly for my taste) but the ones that shine are like nothing you've read before, and for that i give compliments to the chef

[Megan Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

one (1) single page of this would kill a victorian child

[Tess · Rating 1 out of 5]

can we bffr

[Tom Mooney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought this was a heap of crap. But then, I'm 38 and still wearing my baseball cap backwards, so what do I know?

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honor Levy puts the zZzzZZZzzzz in zoomer with this "groundbreaking debut". This was my first encounter with her writing, and I was prepared to hate-read it with the same enjoyment I hate-listen to Dimes Square podcasts, but the vast majority of this collection failed to provoke any emotion at all. It just isn't very good, outside of (mostly) technically fine writing.

I struggled to understand what exactly this even was, a collection of (barely?) fiction stories or another dull series of personal essays and reflections on "growing up online", yawn. It's not literature, that's for sure. At best, it's Twitterature. You can't just repeat a bunch of already-dated internet hot takes, slap a book cover around it, and call it art. I don't know why but I expected a little more. Maybe it was the Jordan Castro cosign. He wrote on similar themes, though a generation apart, but he did it in a more enjoyable and interesting way. This book just felt sophomoric and being self-aware about your cringiness or edgelordiness or even your sincerity, which she clearly has, doesn't inherently add value.

All that said, infinite eye-rolls accounted for, I think she has potential. She seems to know how to write, even if some of the examples in this piece don't exhibit it very well, and she's *thinking* about interesting themes, important things, she just isn't coherently *saying* anything important about them, let alone new. But if she came out with a more refined, more reflective, more mature collection or novel in the future, I would give it a shot. I liked parts of a couple of the stories in here, particularly Halloween Forever. Doubtful she'll become the "voice of the generation" for Gen Z but she could probably say something more insightful if she really tried.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still working out how I felt about this. The effect of one of Levy’s stories on its own is like a short sharp shock but collectively it can be the opposite: deadening. Not necessarily a bad thing; I think that effect fits in well with the style and themes of the collection, the numbness of a life lived online, the desensitisation of exposure, the assertion that ‘nothing is stable, especially not the self’. But I also can’t help thinking the stories work better as I originally encountered (some of) them – in isolation, on websites – than they do collected in a book. Because of that (?) I still think the ones I read that way (‘Cancel Me’, ‘Good Boys’, ‘Internet Girl’) are the best. There’s an insanely good run in the middle, though, with ‘Cancel Me’ followed by ‘Shoebox World’ and ‘Z was for Zoomer’, like three shots of adrenaline in a row.

I received an advance review copy of My First Book from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to deny that this is an achievement, even if parts of it feel like they're coming to print a little late. Honor manages to capture, in almost all of these stories, a childlike amazement with the world, with language, culture, and people. I often found myself getting chills and tearing up while reading this. The writing has an amazing girly quality that can get even the most autistic of men to appreciate how beautiful and difficult it can be to be a girl. I think every girl should read this; I think every boy should read this. The opener "Love Story" is an instant classic. "Internet Girl," "Good Boys," and "Pillow Angels" were all already part of the Levy canon and remain highlights of this dazzling collection.

I imagine a lot of reviewers will focus on the use of internet slang, ASCII art, memes, right wing symapthy blah blah blah, but I think that's missing the point. Or at least, missing what makes these stories so great.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won't lie a lot of the right-wing coded internet speak basically announces this thing as DOA (dated on arrival) but I also think that's kind of the point. The internet is too fast. Something is sincere then immediately becomes ironic for millions of people. I think Honor Levy is a lot smarter than much of the recent online discourse has made her out to be, and I do think this style, though sometimes spiralling into a kind of directionless neuroticism, is a much better attempt at documenting a specific moment in time — but not a place in space. online is everywhere. will continue reading whatever she publishes

[Cend · Rating 2 out of 5]

started off strong, but lost me at the ABCs.
the most interesting short stories were already published previously...the rest is chronic 4ch online brainrot text that only the most insane femcels could understand

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My First Book is a collection of stories and pieces of writing about the internet and growing up on the internet in the 2000s. It was weirdly relatable and made me realise I've not had a single unique experience in my 27 years on this earth. I loved how it played with form and had both a strangely comforting nostalgic feel about it whilst also feeling slightly sinister in how it would mention incel culture, blue pill/red pill stuff and the weird things that have happened on 4chan. But I really liked when it discussed Tumblr and the strange fusion of your identity when you grow up with the early phases of the internet at such a young age. It was such an addictive read and I absolutely loved it. There wasn't a point in it I ever felt bored or a story I felt was bad. I really recommend this if you were chronically online as a child as you will feel super seen reading this, but it's also just an amazing read.

[Walt John Pearce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew that Honor would get it done and Honor got it done and it is even better than I thought it would be.

[Maddie · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book is for girls who snort ketamine and never go outside and for absolutely no one else

[Elise · Rating 2 out of 5]

Higher end of the 2s closer to 3. I’m so happy this chick hit her deadline, which was an apparent driver behind this book. If I had a book deal with an adderall rx I could’ve wrote this, but I don’t and I never will! And for that I gave it a higher rating than expected. Immediately dated with no timeless wisdom yet somehow I still respected it

[🐴 🍖]

DNF. "internet girl" was a bright spot but otherwise i'm just seeing midpilled verbiagecore giving markov chain w/ no relief in sight

[René · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hope nuclear hellfire swallows this world.

[Idil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Granta for sending me a copy of this book!

Perfect for fans of sotce, heaven by marc jacobs, and possibly the red scare podcast. /hj

'My First Book' is a collection of the lamentations of being young and online. This is it in its simplest form, but it is much more than this. It is unoriginal and unique. At first, it reads like a series of unrelated stories, all dark in nature. The structure of each story progresses like words on an i-pod lost in the apocalypse, corrupted so badly by time that they start to reproduce with each other.

Levy's writing style seems to resemble a secret language, like invisible ink, only revealed to those with square eyes. This language, littered with cultural references, memes and crude humour, seem to speak for and to this digital generation. I found myself laughing randomly at certain points, something that Levy herself points out in the book to be due to the hundreds of pixels of internet knowledge that had been injected into my brain since my youth. She writes in the way that meme pages, internet 'collectives', 6 second/15 second/3 minute videos have been writing in for almost two decades now. I would say that this book, her first book, is the anthropology of the chronically online community.

There is a sense of intentional entitlement throughout the novel- I think it is important to note that this book is not the universal experience of the chronically online Gen Z-er. This is the narrative of a rich white LA girl, a product of her physical and digital environment. She embraces this overlap with the insufferable behaviour of her main character, who I find myself cringing at so much at, and seems to develop into an unfiltered stream of consciousness.

I personally really enjoyed this book. The one missing star is due to the fact that I know this will inspire a wave of young writers/creatives (like myself) to write more about the horrors of the internet, to try and quantify it. I'm not sure that I want that.

EDIT: after rereading, I am decreasing my rating. I think I was right to highlight the entitlement and I fear I may have overlooked it due to my excitement about internet storytelling. I still enjoyed this book as a window into the mind of a modern white girl, but it is deeply flawed in its lack of critical thought of topics such as “cancel culture”. still a phenomenal read and engaging narrative style!

[Jim Elkins]

Trying Not to Read for Zeitgeist

Honor Levy's book has been reviewed mainly as a report about the Zeitgeist, from a young novelist who identifies as Gen Z. Adam Wilson, in Bookforum, quotes a passage full of memes, kaomojis, and topical internet references and says that the book sometimes has a "high barrier of entry"—the prose is dense with references (Summer 2024, p. 26). The book's centerpiece, "Z Was For Zoomer," performs the role of cultural guide by providing an alphabetical glossary of Zeitgeisty terms such as "based" and "edgelord."

Levy likes exhibiting the insouciance of a Gen Z girl in LA (as she says of herself). She likes mansplaining, she says, even if she already knows what's being explained. She likes to shock her friends by making jokes about being canceled. She likes the idea that her data is not private: "giving away my data is easy too," she says. "I imagine myself as data rich..."

I think it's important, in assessing any book that presents itself as a report, to try to subtract away all the unfamiliarity (or the unwanted familiarity), the frisson of knowing things that might otherwise be hard to figure out, the illusion of being somehow in on part of a social group, the dubious pleasure of accepting an author's unasked open-armed invitation to cultural intimacy, and above all the temptation to read fiction and personal essays as reports on the real world. All uses of experimental writing as reporting biodegrade into ordinary prose when their moment has passed. The question is: What kind of writing is it?

There is some sharp writing in My First Book:

"I wonder what would have happened if Neo grabbed both the pills in Morpheuas's open hands and stuffed them both down his throat. Would he have ended up like me?"

"Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but you still can't lave. The floors are made of that IKEA wood; we cannot use a spoon to escape."

About her identity: "She knows that's the sort of thing you can write in a personal essay, and that the personal is probably political. She doesn't know quite how confused she sounds."

Levy can be a good ranter, and she transcribes states of drunkenness and highs very well, but as reviewers have noted the transcriptions can veer into glibness or read like they were experienced just to be written (as Georges Perec once said of his dreams):

"Ottilie says she wants to take Greta Thunberg's virginity. I tell her that one day I'm going to fuck Barron Trump. Kaylee has a nosebleed. Hadleigh M. licks it up..."

"My parents had sex on Space Mountain. Nine months later I would be the second-worst thing to happen on September 11, 2001. One second, I was a martyr, piloting a plane right into a skyscraper, filled with love. Then, there with a puff, I was a beautiful baby girl being pulled out of a soap opera actress in Los Angeles."

But at its best the writing has a sort of iridescent energy:

"He'd stand above her, tall and strong. She'd stare up at him with her shining anime, no her shining animal eyes, her real eyes, realize real lies."

Wilson makes the comparison to Mark Leyner, whom he calls "a '90s cult figure now largely remembered as the primary target of 'E UNIBUS PLURAM,' David Foster Wallace's 1990 polemic on television's deleterious influence on American fiction." I hope it's not true that Leyner is mainly remembered through Wallace. Several of his books, like The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, have an energy that's both incandescent and iridescent, meaning both pressurized and sly or slippery. Wilson correctly says that Wallace's critique was off-target, since Leyner wasn't trying "to ridicule... TV culture," and Wallace had issues with his own writing. Leyner, Wilson says, was actually trying "to repurpose sitcom clichés and ad-speak into something ecstatic and alive." Wilson says he's wary of misreading Levy as Wallace misread Leyner, because most of Levy's pieces in this book resist the culture she finds herself in. But he likes the parts where she isn't resisting.

There's excellent writing distributed in both kinds of texts. Wallace was definitively wrong about Leyner, but he would have been half right about Levy. I hope her next books relinquish both reporting and resisting and focus on writing and ecstasy.

July 2024

[Lena · Rating 1 out of 5]

Any anti lit internet gen z book just makes me feel like im reading my notes app

[Jenny Muller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been on the Internet longer than Honor Levy has been alive, and my kids are Gen Z/Alpha so I know what things like “Naruto run” and “UwU” mean, but generally the sentiments in this book have been expressed more effectively elsewhere. Honor Levy is a hipster (is that still a term? Even if it isn’t, that’s what she is, just like the 2003 Williamsburg hipsters), and therefore her writing style is filled with lyricism meant to make it seem “literary,” because she went to Bennington and is conversant with postmodernism and all those signifiers. But the problem is you can’t make banal ideas profound just by over-lyricizing them. Especially when her lyrical style is so repetitive. “It was a love story, it all was, everything is, and always has been.” “We’re all in trouble and we always were.” “All at once it’s all at once. It’s beginning and ending all at once all the time.” “Everything always happens again and again and then again stops too.” It stops feeling poetic and starts feeling like BABBLING. I get that the Cool Kids in their 20s use coke/Adderall/Vyvanse but the literary effect is underwhelming. My teenage kid showed me the Bo Burnham song “Welcome to the Internet,” which does what this book does way better and a lot faster.

There is also a lot of stupid stuff here that is way older than the Gen Z Internet. Like all of the stories where she’s hand-wringing about being privileged and the Plight of the Less Fortunate. They sound just like the essays kids submitted to my high school literary magazine in 1989 about feeling sorry for/volunteering with the homeless. Also the stuff where she is caught between wanting to be a Marxist and wanting to be an Edgelord. I was in college in the early ‘90s when Political Correctness and Katie Roiphe and Take Back the Night were buzzwords, and I get how the sanctimoniousness can feel asphyxiating and make you want to say something offensive, but you also don’t want to hurt anyone. Levy’s struggles with this situation are relatable, but she doesn’t say anything that compelling about it.

That said, there are occasional moments of insightfulness that give it 3 stars rather than 1. Like the footnote on page 76 about how the part of Brett Kavanaugh’s assault on Christine Blasey Ford that hurt the most was when he and his friend looked at each other and laughed.

This book mostly reads like the Dimes Square kids are looking at each other and laughing, because Honor Levy got a book deal purely on the strength of her Dimes Square-ness.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe 2.5 stars. Instagram diaspora prose for white kids who relate to having an online racism phase, like many works in this genre the stories rely heavily on callbacks to cultural references and hoping your experience will fill in the blanks. There are a few promising moments in this book (particularly some of the entries in the dictionary hermit essay "Z Was For Zoomer") but the rest largely circled the same topics: resentment of identity due to feeling unmoored from it, the wild west Internet, an aloof detachment to the future or any responsibility towards it.

Finishing this book has me wondering about the use of the alt-lit / internet lit genre as a whole. I totally get why the author wrote a book like this. For years, I've been fascinated by pretty much any Art About Being Online that I could get my hands on. Young people growing up in the digital age are also the first to form meaning in that whole experience. Does it only need to feel real to Be real? A question that defines how we cope with virtual identity, connection, even trauma. I like the reassurance through art like this that my early clumsy cybersex encounters, my choice in anime girl avatar, and my scary older online "friend" could be significant or formative even. I like knowing other people could be formed the same way. I felt this kinship in Levy's short story "Internet Girl", and that sense of yearning is the strongest current throughout My First Book.

There's a bit of buzz around this book and books like it, because there aren't many books like them (at least in the traditional publishing millieu). Still, I feel like it's already become not just outdated but overdone. Alongside the development of this genre is a years-long onslaught of reflections in other mediums about the same experience. I solemnly agree a tweet about being "groomed on Kik", I cringe to a tiktok memeing the experience of being shown a gore video in a high school class, I've fondly watched retrospectives of early tumblr. We are, in a way, constantly surrounded by internet literature, and traditional forays are inherently going to be behind in its progression. Eventually the genre will need to mature beyond mere reference, My First Book wasn't there yet.

[Zach Zoeller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, alright, so. This wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. In fact… it’s not bad, period. It’s just not the greatest.

Let it be said: Honor Levy is witty and a capable writer and occasionally experimental in some pretty interesting ways. The story “Cancel Me” is incredibly compelling and definitely the best thing here. I recommend you read that one if you’re curious about her style. In these stories, she encapsulates the anxiety and the self-loathing and the general nihilism that a vast majority of Gen Z has garnered through growing up in the internet age. This is the good stuff, the crux, the MEAT.

Alas. I don’t find her to be super interesting as a person. She’s a sad, upper middle class, cliqued up writer from New York. It’s an interesting character to read about, for sure, but I find that kind of stuff more compelling when it’s being written by someone who … *isn’t* the character irl. There’s a certain lack of self-awareness here despite Levy REALLY wanting you to think she’s self-aware af. Also. I’m not buying this “voice of Gen Z” marketing shit, sowwy.

Light 6/10, she ended up winning me over with her voice and her pessimism and, like I said, it’s relatable as shit for those of us who grew up with the internet. Read EARTH ANGEL by Madeline Cash, though, if you dug this. She does this type of internet age nihilism so much better and with so much more verve.

[Nelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I expected more from her

[Colette Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book and when I brought it home it called me a gay retard and stole all my passwords.

[Lilibeth Garcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

reading this book was a journey in terms of how i felt about it. ive been an unapologetic honor levy fan since i first read pillow angels, and having just reread it, its now my favorite story in this collection. its also the last one, which was an apt choice. i closed the book feeling the same way i did after i read pillow angels however long ago.

but the rest of the book was hard to get through. the writing was simple enough, but i was disappointed by some of the stories as they read formulaic and were repetitive in flow. the previously published stories that landed the book deal were and are spectacular and stand out in this series, but repeating their patterns and affects over and over again kind of lessened their impact for me.

there are some shining moments of creativity and brilliance here and there, particularly in halloween forever and love story, which i could tell levy put her soul into. but thats the thing. most of the stories felt like what you'd turn in for a creative writing assignment that you had two weeks to work on and was only supposed to be an exercise. i felt them lacking in soul.

this book couldve been really cool if given more time to mature--but then it wouldnt be the book it is, which is supposed to capture the spirit of gen z while still in its youth and the current internet age. it just reads so, so young. thats not necessarily a bad thing. that "and we were infinite" vibe is a genre in itself. 16 year old me wouldve found it perfect. my current 29 year old self instead had too many flashbacks to when i thought i had the universe and society and philosophy and religion figured out at the peak of a psychedelic trip.

again, i went back and forth between: cringing, but then feeling deep respect and even tenderness for the earnestness of this project (esp. in our era of irony and post-irony).

i hope levy writes a book she pours her guts into. i think it would be great. i think she can and will do it.

[Abby · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first flop