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Parasocialite
- GenresShort Stories
150 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2024
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229 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 19, 2024
Part of the Dimes Square writers, there's an ethos at hand in remedy to the way we feel and act, now.
Perfectly captured between poetry and short story, these stories dip into melancholy and humor seamlessly. There's a handful of good bits here, great one liners, great moments, conversations I feel like I've overheard before, examining all the ways in which we navigate the parasocial. Who am I to you and can you see me? Do you have power over me or do I wield any power over my interests, romantic or curious? Everything feels sharp with how short the pieces feel, poems at times bit-sized and whimsical. A perfect read to kill the book slump.
Perfectly captured between poetry and short story, these stories dip into melancholy and humor seamlessly. There's a handful of good bits here, great one liners, great moments, conversations I feel like I've overheard before, examining all the ways in which we navigate the parasocial. Who am I to you and can you see me? Do you have power over me or do I wield any power over my interests, romantic or curious? Everything feels sharp with how short the pieces feel, poems at times bit-sized and whimsical. A perfect read to kill the book slump.
May 28, 2024
"We're home alone. You know what that means," I told her.
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know. I just thought it would be funny to say."
This is one of my favourite one bits from Parasocialite.
This book has a bunch of funny one-line zingers. I felt like I was on a tour guide of the museum of Menjavir’s mind. I love the imagery and the authenticity in each text.
Delicious and digestible prose + poetry. Reading this book made me feel like I was at a sleepover with my gals and we’re chatting about aliens and boys and life.
A must read!!
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know. I just thought it would be funny to say."
This is one of my favourite one bits from Parasocialite.
This book has a bunch of funny one-line zingers. I felt like I was on a tour guide of the museum of Menjavir’s mind. I love the imagery and the authenticity in each text.
Delicious and digestible prose + poetry. Reading this book made me feel like I was at a sleepover with my gals and we’re chatting about aliens and boys and life.
A must read!!
June 16, 2024
Parasocialite is a collection of poetry and short stories mostly focusing on parasocial relationships. Being someone who is fascinated by parasocial relationships and constantly having conversations about them…this was perfect for me. Even without being a huge poetry reader I still found this to be extremely well written and resonated with me. This felt like I was hanging out with a friend and chatting. Highly recommend.
March 25, 2024
“I am as deep as whatever body of water you would like to drown yourself in”
alive; daring fate with teeth. i love you britt
alive; daring fate with teeth. i love you britt
June 27, 2024
i think i was more attracted to the short stories than the poetry, but overall it gives punchy iphone camera flash fiction vibes that i loved
May 17, 2025
At first I thought I wouldn't have anything to add to the conversation about Parasocialite, even though I enjoyed it: after all, I'm at a few years at a remove from the author's generation, I'm not cool and only barely girl; my formative late-teen and early-20s social experiences were not facilitated via Twitter, but rather via Livejournal forums and weird niche tumblr circles, and I've never had to navigate relationships with teen boys or grown men.
But maybe that's precisely why I should weigh in, because I found this book relatable despite all that, and I think it's a sign that Menjivar has something going on here. I want people who read this book not to miss out on an aspect of its genuine, writerly observational skill: how it captures the fears and desires of a girl who's coming of age online, and for whom online means all kinds of different things. For a while now I've seen girl online get shoehorned into being a brand, something you do, a suit you zip up that is only skin deep. But I'll tell you what: I don't really go to parties and I was still a girl online for many years, and there's a lot of the horrific unknown that comes with that experience. It's a richer vein than people give it credit for, for more than just autofiction or self-reflection, but for real genre fiction and surreal, human writing.
There are lots of reasons why. I'm not sure how it was for Gen Z, but in my experience it was a bit like this: you're barely a person yet, and boiling over with desire and an ambition to change and shape your reality. And at the same time, you spend time online and start to understand that people there want things from you, but those people are not always peers; sometimes they're much older, sometimes they're lying about who they are; sometimes you just do not know what their motivations are, and that's horrifying for a developing self-image. I think coming to terms with this–of the move from teenhood and young adulthood being a peer-centric experience to being a sort of surreal, inter-generational mess of online anonymity and falsehood–is something more writers need to do, and I think Menjivar is doing it well here. And what I liked about Parasocalite is how it occasionally drags that freakish, baffling element of the unknown into broad daylight: there are dead zoo animals and bodies piling up, red herring moments that feel completely private or impossible to name and might not have happened at all. I think what I found relatable I found in the most ridiculous, unreal moments.
What this says to me is that we are probably reaching the end of "online" being synonymous with "loser," or "hot girl" or synonymous with any type of person at all. Onlineness and its violent, image-obsessed transformation of the self is something that happens to, well, almost everyone these days. It happens to winners, to losers, and it also happens to all the people who exist in between and are just trying to make a life. To say it another way: the character(s) in this book remind me a fair bit of the protagonist of Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair, in terms of how her level of agency against her own exploitation, her youth, and her desire for "more" are all mixed up over a veneer of horror. But in Shoenbrun's film, that character hinges on the fact that she is friendless; she is online because there's nowhere else to go and she doesn't leave her room. The girl(s) in Parasocalite are out there among us–and, importantly, they're still online. We're less comfortable with an online that simply mediates our reality, and that every girl is part of, whether she likes it or not. I think some of the aversion people have to litfic that is about the onlineness of everything is really just an itchy distaste for this idea, and I'm counting myself among that number. Anyways. Give it a read, it's quite fun.
But maybe that's precisely why I should weigh in, because I found this book relatable despite all that, and I think it's a sign that Menjivar has something going on here. I want people who read this book not to miss out on an aspect of its genuine, writerly observational skill: how it captures the fears and desires of a girl who's coming of age online, and for whom online means all kinds of different things. For a while now I've seen girl online get shoehorned into being a brand, something you do, a suit you zip up that is only skin deep. But I'll tell you what: I don't really go to parties and I was still a girl online for many years, and there's a lot of the horrific unknown that comes with that experience. It's a richer vein than people give it credit for, for more than just autofiction or self-reflection, but for real genre fiction and surreal, human writing.
There are lots of reasons why. I'm not sure how it was for Gen Z, but in my experience it was a bit like this: you're barely a person yet, and boiling over with desire and an ambition to change and shape your reality. And at the same time, you spend time online and start to understand that people there want things from you, but those people are not always peers; sometimes they're much older, sometimes they're lying about who they are; sometimes you just do not know what their motivations are, and that's horrifying for a developing self-image. I think coming to terms with this–of the move from teenhood and young adulthood being a peer-centric experience to being a sort of surreal, inter-generational mess of online anonymity and falsehood–is something more writers need to do, and I think Menjivar is doing it well here. And what I liked about Parasocalite is how it occasionally drags that freakish, baffling element of the unknown into broad daylight: there are dead zoo animals and bodies piling up, red herring moments that feel completely private or impossible to name and might not have happened at all. I think what I found relatable I found in the most ridiculous, unreal moments.
What this says to me is that we are probably reaching the end of "online" being synonymous with "loser," or "hot girl" or synonymous with any type of person at all. Onlineness and its violent, image-obsessed transformation of the self is something that happens to, well, almost everyone these days. It happens to winners, to losers, and it also happens to all the people who exist in between and are just trying to make a life. To say it another way: the character(s) in this book remind me a fair bit of the protagonist of Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair, in terms of how her level of agency against her own exploitation, her youth, and her desire for "more" are all mixed up over a veneer of horror. But in Shoenbrun's film, that character hinges on the fact that she is friendless; she is online because there's nowhere else to go and she doesn't leave her room. The girl(s) in Parasocalite are out there among us–and, importantly, they're still online. We're less comfortable with an online that simply mediates our reality, and that every girl is part of, whether she likes it or not. I think some of the aversion people have to litfic that is about the onlineness of everything is really just an itchy distaste for this idea, and I'm counting myself among that number. Anyways. Give it a read, it's quite fun.
December 4, 2025
If someone forced me to make a basic comparison, I’d compare the book to the Tumblr of a thoughtful, sassy, somewhat prim girl. Due to the mix of poems and stories (and… I guess… multigenre works), the book even has the disarming, collage-like form of a Tumblr, so anyone can open the book and start reading.
The stories and poems take place right now, so there’s Instagram, Tinder, and countless aspects that reflect the dominance of screens. What happens in and around screens is overwhelming, but the voices in Menjivar’s works remain graceful and playful. Menjivar doesn’t sound judgmental or intolerantly cool. She is a sincere observer and/or participant, and she often incorporates God, giving the works a cute Christian aura.
The first story connects Tinder and first kisses with twee and charm. There’s another story that humorously captures the social pressures of working at Trader Joe’s. A third story has a suspenseful post-# MeToo scene when an actor issues a startling confession in a DM. My favorite poem is the starkly spiritual “Hot Tub as Mirror.”
Sometimes, the stories get too surreal, and certain poems seem like stories chopped into lines. But overall, the book has the same sort of clarity and sharpness as other canonized books by girls, like Leopoldine Core’s When Watched, Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life?, and Honor Levy’s My First Book.
The stories and poems take place right now, so there’s Instagram, Tinder, and countless aspects that reflect the dominance of screens. What happens in and around screens is overwhelming, but the voices in Menjivar’s works remain graceful and playful. Menjivar doesn’t sound judgmental or intolerantly cool. She is a sincere observer and/or participant, and she often incorporates God, giving the works a cute Christian aura.
The first story connects Tinder and first kisses with twee and charm. There’s another story that humorously captures the social pressures of working at Trader Joe’s. A third story has a suspenseful post-# MeToo scene when an actor issues a startling confession in a DM. My favorite poem is the starkly spiritual “Hot Tub as Mirror.”
Sometimes, the stories get too surreal, and certain poems seem like stories chopped into lines. But overall, the book has the same sort of clarity and sharpness as other canonized books by girls, like Leopoldine Core’s When Watched, Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life?, and Honor Levy’s My First Book.
July 29, 2024
I found this book captivating and amusing, finishing it in just one day. The poetry and stories are rich with unexpected wordplay, wit, and depth of thought, leaving me hungry for more. Many of the stories felt relatable, as if we had similar experiences growing up in different places. Some had a fairytale quality that was both unexpected and intriguing. Despite its seemingly nonlinear structure and discrete chapters, the book felt open-ended. I’d love to read more from this author and look forward to seeing what she does next.
July 27, 2025
Mood-drenched, indulgent, and hyper-attuned to appearances, Brittany Menjivar’s Parasocialite captures a kind of teenage dream feeling that is evocative not just of the perennial fantasy life that is youth, but of the simulatory quality of online experience and post-simulacrum reality.
Still young herself, Menjivar hasn’t yet lost the romanticized darkness of adolescence (“I sleep with my mouth cracked / To let in the spiders / They weave the most gorgeous / Webs in my throat”, "I am like the dead but you can touch me"), but it’s tempered by a command of mood and tone and an elliptical quality that stops it from defaulting to cliché.
There’s a sophistication to her craft to balance the alt-lit rawness, but her MFA sensibility never constrains the aesthetic that is truly her own: dreamy and damaged and slipping between suburban mundanity, the fabulist surrealism of Italo Calvino, and the glamorous decadence of Hollywood aspiration—all delivered with a disarming, self-aware playfulness.
This aesthetic is especially vivid in her story “Elephant Crossing,” the offbeat yet haunting tale of zoo animals escaping into the suburbs, climaxing when a group of friends “cruise[s] around town like we were on a safari,” trying to catch a glimpse of the animals as if they were hunting down a monster. “In the dead of night, I understood why so many horror movies had been set in the suburbs,” Menjivar writes.
The group is led by class president Bobby—Menjivar uses the archetype of the Popular Boy in Suburban Teen Horror knowingly and with irony. By imbuing him with a mythic, almost fantastical quality and placing him in a banal suburban setting, she creates an effect that’s both uncanny and strangely transcendent.
The book’s tagline—“Could you make it among the people who don’t need to make it” —reads like a throwback to an era of Hollywood fame that no longer exists (if it ever existed outside our imaginations), where beautiful women go down rabbit holes of glamorous self-destruction à la Mulholland Drive.
But in today’s world, where filtered beauties go down rabbit holes of soul-debauching, algorithmic-conjured illusion every day, it feels less like nostalgia and more like a description of life online. (Indeed, isn’t there something Lynchian about the internet—its recursive dream logic, its impossibly smooth transitions between horror and banality?)
Menjivar is one of the founders of Car Crash Collective, an L.A.-based reading series with a subcultural flair. The name is inspired by a near-fatal accident Menjivar survived in 2021. I’m not really interested in a writer’s bio unless I think it will make you want to pick up their book. I do want you to pick up her book (she’s a Goth-like beauty, Yale grad too), but I add this detail because car crashes figure in the stories like pieces of a dream one keeps remembering—or like distorted slivers of a reality that returns to one in dreams.
In these choices, you can see the maturity of an artist who can impose distance between her experiences and her work, avoiding the millennial self-exposure of autofiction. In her prose poem "A Semi Truck Hit Me," she writes: "I tried to pray and wound up thinking about stars—how their distance makes them register as fiction." Could this finally mark the end of the autofiction boom? 🙏
Parasocialite is an extremely slim, afternoon TikTok binge of a book—consisting of a series of short stories, poems, and tweet-like microforms that feel interconnected in the way that internet content consumed back to back, or the fragments of dreams, can start to form its own narrative logic. What it all adds up to is a vibe. There’s vibe branding, vibe coding—and then there’s vibe writing: aesthetic-first, mood-driven, and emotionally saturated.
Vibe writing makes room for a kind of creative freedom that marks a departure from the self-seriousness of corporate-approved lit. Parasocialite is an example of this—a reflection of the blossoming of Gen Z’s layered, self-aware, and often irreverent relationship to identity and storytelling shaped by the internet, at the center of which is a refreshing spirit of play.
The millennials of Web 2.0 took identity too seriously—thanks in no small part to Facebook compelling them to tie their profiles to real names and photos, and to the rise of a late-capitalist economy built around identity-based digital marketing. These forces contributed to an internet culture obsessed with identity, to the point of constructing an entire political worldview around it. Gen Z, by contrast, is relieving themselves of the shackles of fixed identity, embracing anonymity and playful avatars, reminiscent of the early days of the internet when it was still fun.
This playfulness carries into Menjivar’s style, which delightfully flips between a hallucinatory dreamspace and the reality of suburban monotony. Her work feels like the internet itself—where the fantastic and the extreme are juxtaposed with the familiar and the banal.
In a *digital landscape* glutted with content and stripped of human presence, vibes—instant, ultradigestible bytes of meaning—are among the few forms that still have what it takes to cut through, placing them alongside the tweet, gif, and headline as dominant units of expression.
But unlike consuming a vibe on the internet, Menjivar’s writing isn’t just another scroll through the ephemera of human creation. It doesn’t just curate aesthetics; it makes them into art.
Still young herself, Menjivar hasn’t yet lost the romanticized darkness of adolescence (“I sleep with my mouth cracked / To let in the spiders / They weave the most gorgeous / Webs in my throat”, "I am like the dead but you can touch me"), but it’s tempered by a command of mood and tone and an elliptical quality that stops it from defaulting to cliché.
There’s a sophistication to her craft to balance the alt-lit rawness, but her MFA sensibility never constrains the aesthetic that is truly her own: dreamy and damaged and slipping between suburban mundanity, the fabulist surrealism of Italo Calvino, and the glamorous decadence of Hollywood aspiration—all delivered with a disarming, self-aware playfulness.
This aesthetic is especially vivid in her story “Elephant Crossing,” the offbeat yet haunting tale of zoo animals escaping into the suburbs, climaxing when a group of friends “cruise[s] around town like we were on a safari,” trying to catch a glimpse of the animals as if they were hunting down a monster. “In the dead of night, I understood why so many horror movies had been set in the suburbs,” Menjivar writes.
The group is led by class president Bobby—Menjivar uses the archetype of the Popular Boy in Suburban Teen Horror knowingly and with irony. By imbuing him with a mythic, almost fantastical quality and placing him in a banal suburban setting, she creates an effect that’s both uncanny and strangely transcendent.
The book’s tagline—“Could you make it among the people who don’t need to make it” —reads like a throwback to an era of Hollywood fame that no longer exists (if it ever existed outside our imaginations), where beautiful women go down rabbit holes of glamorous self-destruction à la Mulholland Drive.
But in today’s world, where filtered beauties go down rabbit holes of soul-debauching, algorithmic-conjured illusion every day, it feels less like nostalgia and more like a description of life online. (Indeed, isn’t there something Lynchian about the internet—its recursive dream logic, its impossibly smooth transitions between horror and banality?)
Menjivar is one of the founders of Car Crash Collective, an L.A.-based reading series with a subcultural flair. The name is inspired by a near-fatal accident Menjivar survived in 2021. I’m not really interested in a writer’s bio unless I think it will make you want to pick up their book. I do want you to pick up her book (she’s a Goth-like beauty, Yale grad too), but I add this detail because car crashes figure in the stories like pieces of a dream one keeps remembering—or like distorted slivers of a reality that returns to one in dreams.
In these choices, you can see the maturity of an artist who can impose distance between her experiences and her work, avoiding the millennial self-exposure of autofiction. In her prose poem "A Semi Truck Hit Me," she writes: "I tried to pray and wound up thinking about stars—how their distance makes them register as fiction." Could this finally mark the end of the autofiction boom? 🙏
Parasocialite is an extremely slim, afternoon TikTok binge of a book—consisting of a series of short stories, poems, and tweet-like microforms that feel interconnected in the way that internet content consumed back to back, or the fragments of dreams, can start to form its own narrative logic. What it all adds up to is a vibe. There’s vibe branding, vibe coding—and then there’s vibe writing: aesthetic-first, mood-driven, and emotionally saturated.
Vibe writing makes room for a kind of creative freedom that marks a departure from the self-seriousness of corporate-approved lit. Parasocialite is an example of this—a reflection of the blossoming of Gen Z’s layered, self-aware, and often irreverent relationship to identity and storytelling shaped by the internet, at the center of which is a refreshing spirit of play.
The millennials of Web 2.0 took identity too seriously—thanks in no small part to Facebook compelling them to tie their profiles to real names and photos, and to the rise of a late-capitalist economy built around identity-based digital marketing. These forces contributed to an internet culture obsessed with identity, to the point of constructing an entire political worldview around it. Gen Z, by contrast, is relieving themselves of the shackles of fixed identity, embracing anonymity and playful avatars, reminiscent of the early days of the internet when it was still fun.
This playfulness carries into Menjivar’s style, which delightfully flips between a hallucinatory dreamspace and the reality of suburban monotony. Her work feels like the internet itself—where the fantastic and the extreme are juxtaposed with the familiar and the banal.
In a *digital landscape* glutted with content and stripped of human presence, vibes—instant, ultradigestible bytes of meaning—are among the few forms that still have what it takes to cut through, placing them alongside the tweet, gif, and headline as dominant units of expression.
But unlike consuming a vibe on the internet, Menjivar’s writing isn’t just another scroll through the ephemera of human creation. It doesn’t just curate aesthetics; it makes them into art.
January 17, 2025
enjoyed the prose-- short enough to be visions, scenes, not really whole stories, it was an interesting form. i feel like the poetry was not as good as these, wish the whole book was these scenes-- but at the same time i did like how the poetry added to the fragmented nature of the book
March 21, 2025
I’m way behind on books, but I just got this one in the mail yesterday and finished it today. It’s been a while since I’ve done something like that. An enjoyable collection of short stories and poetry. My introduction to both the author and the publisher. I look forward to more in the future.
December 29, 2025
A roller coaster of a collection. Brittany Menjivar is the queen of gut-punching final lines (and well-placed semicolons). When I got the book, I thought it was a novel(la), and I'm still not convinced it isn't.
March 26, 2024
Crush the one-way media mirror! Transubstantiate your profile pic! Vaporwave the food court of flirtationships! And hyperventilate the wow & now of Parasocialite!
April 5, 2024
Congrats on the debut, Britt!
May 6, 2024
“God is a promise that will be fulfilled tomorrow”
Beautiful work as always, congrats on the debut, Britt!
Beautiful work as always, congrats on the debut, Britt!
May 16, 2024
Fun, real, raw. Britt is a classic and true fiction writer.
I'll be watching this space ....
I'll be watching this space ....
August 6, 2024
This book is just SO Britt. I felt like I was back in IB Film watching DNOTS. Love
September 21, 2024
3.5 stars
February 3, 2025
found this book completely by accident. awesome
May 1, 2025
fave book
June 1, 2025
iconic
August 12, 2025
Quick little read. Easy to pick up and put down. Very relatable living in LA and reading about her experiences and perceptions of Hollywood.
September 1, 2025
like literature, I guess
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews