A short story in Honor Levy’s first book centres around a 22-year old girl wondering what kind of legacy she’s going to leave behind when she dies. “She thinks about the mass graves in Central Park and about everyone she’s ever known, all the skater thems, literary magazine editors, Catholic cokeheads, bodega cats, hypebeasts and personal essayists all curled up together under the dirt, a real feast for the worms,” Levy writes. “She thinks about how who they thought they were won’t matter, because it never really did. All that matters is what’s left behind.”

Levy is someone who has Reddit threads dedicated to her mythology (for a time, people were convinced she was the Grand-Niece of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy), who has been called the ‘voice of her generation’ as both an insult and an accolade, who is associated with New York’s infamous Dimes Square, and who went viral a few months ago due to a certain corner of the internet hating the way – or the fact – she was profiled in New York Magazine’s The Cut. Through her writing, Levy seems, at times, unaffected and nonchalant – how you’d expect someone moving in New York’s coolest creative circles to perhaps hold themselves. But speaking with her, she’s thoughtful and unpretentious. With a sort of nervous energy synonymous with overthinking. It’s therefore hard not to associate the anxieties of Sad Girl with Levy’s own. “When you’re thinking about legacy actively, it just becomes a performance,” she says. “And I guess, everything is performance, and everything on the internet is a performance of capitalism. But I’ve stopped thinking about legacy in the pathological way I used to think about it as a kid. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.”

When we speak, five months after her book, My First Book, was released, Levy is in a small town in Switzerland on a writer’s retreat. She’s attempting to finish a novel and flew her cat there with her on the plane. Though she’s finding it hard to quantify how productive she’s been, she’d been stuck on chapter one of The Artist’s Way – a 12-week creative course to thank for the popularity of morning pages – “for years”. In Switzerland, she finally made it to chapter two. “You sign this contract with yourself that you’ll take care of yourself and go to bed on time while doing the course. So, I’m blaming The Artist’s Way. It’s like, I’m taking such good care of myself creatively that I can’t write properly.” For over a month, Levy thought she was in the middle of nowhere and was romanticising herself as being completely off the grid. Last week, she found out she’s just 20 minutes away from Zurich. “I could literally go and get sushi if I wanted.”

Levy’s writing, with its warp speed and dichotomy for integrating internet slang within extended prose, captures the hyper-specifics of an era of girls growing up online: one reviewer noted My First Book wouldn’t make sense to anyone born before 1995, and another at the New York Times admitted to having Googled at least one word. Chapters oscillate between meme references and provocative right-wing ideas with a disaffected, youthful nihilism, to thoughtful, sincere political, societal, and existential observations. In Hall of Mirrors, the story’s privileged narrator volunteers with impoverished primary school kids down the road from her prestigious university and questions why she got to eat Nutella on a field trip while “these kids have to stuff tuna sandwiches in their bags because they don’t have food at home” and why she “had to write a sentence so on the nose” in the same breath.

“We’re getting to a point where everybody has such a crazy footprint. It’s kind of sad we can’t just pack up, become new people, and remake ourselves in the way that even 20 years ago you could.”

A lot of what Levy writes about is grappling with the tension between existing as a real person in the world and this other entity we encompass online – one we can’t control, as much as we might like to – and one that’s becoming increasingly hard to separate from the other. “As a teenager, I was paranoid about people taking pictures of me smoking a cigarette or drinking alcohol. I was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to become president now’,” Levy tells me. “We’re getting to a point where everybody has such a crazy footprint. It’s kind of sad we can’t just pack up, become new people, and remake ourselves in the way that even 20 years ago you could.” It’s easy to dismiss thoughts of one’s legacy as taking oneself too seriously – in response to a question, Levy references the Jemima Kirke meme, “Some of you think about yourselves too much”, which is no doubt true. But when you’re a generation that grew up on the internet, it’s hard to divorce yourself from a legacy that for most will be inescapable. “If we thought nothing would be remembered, maybe we would have more to say,” Levy poses. “Or if we thought everything would be remembered, maybe we’d have more to say. I don’t know.”

Growing up in East Los Angeles, Levy felt trapped by the city. “It was all very yellow and brown. We’d drive by the freeway, and I’d look beyond the road past the separators and be like, ‘Oh, I need to run away into the forest there’.” She always liked movies and playing make-believe games. She loved her acting class, but knew the craft was something that didn’t come naturally to her. “I could make myself cry, but I didn’t like the feeling of it.” When Levy was 14, they were made to perform various Shakespeare scenes “and it went really, really badly”. The teacher decided instead to let the students write their own scenes. “We wrote acting class kid monologues, like, I have dyslexia, my parents are getting divorced, stuff like that.” Levy performed her story of breaking up with a heroin addict boyfriend who was scared of rollercoasters. It was an immediate hit. “It was fun learning to write through plays because it’s predominantly dialogues, which is one of the oldest forms of writing. I still fall back on it now when I’m having trouble.” Levy couldn’t keep a diary as a kid because she kept thinking of it as if it was a performance. “I was falling back into that when I was first doing morning pages like, ‘Oh my gosh, what if my kids read this one day when I’m dead?’,” she says. “Or, I don’t know, you know how people from the olden days, their correspondences are published in books? I guess in the future, people’s text messages are going to be published. The great love letters. The great “U up?” texts.”

While she was studying at Bennington College in Vermont, the school that counts Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt as alumni (partially why Levy applied), Levy posted a picture of a book of her tweets her friend had printed, pretending the small cult indie publisher Tyrant Books published it. To Levy’s surprise, Tyrant’s publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano DMed her, asking whether she really had a book. She said yes, then began writing one. Tyrant published two of Levy’s short stories in 2020 and, when she was just 21, another was published by The New Yorker. The following July, DiTrapano, who had become a mentor and friend, signed on to publish her debut, so Levy wrote the first draft, then DiTrapano suddenly died. “I didn’t open the document for a while after that”. A year or so later, Levy got an agent, and the book was picked up by Penguin. Revisiting the stories “felt like opening up an old-time capsule. I didn’t even know how to edit most of them because it felt like it had been so long since I’d written them.” Levy pauses and rephrases. “People spend, like, 20 years on one book. So, I don’t know what I’m saying. But I feel like there’s a huge shift between certain ages, especially from teens to twenties.” She then references the internet like a thesaurus – something she does often during our conversation, pulling memes from memory mid-sentence. “I saw this TikTok of a lifeguard saying they overheard a little boy telling another kid, ‘It feels like it’s been many years since my last birthday. I’ve been seven for a long time’,” she says. “I had a lot of space and distance from the stories. Culture had progressed, vibes had shifted. It was hard to go back.”

“Or, I don’t know, you know, how people from the olden days, their correspondences are published in books? I guess in the future, people’s text messages are going to be published. The great love letters. The great “U up?” texts.”

During this time, and throughout the pandemic, Levy was hanging out in Dimes Square, a small area on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that had become a central hub for young artists and creatives whose opinions and events were often written or tweeted about. She became one of the city’s most prominent alt-lit e-girls, started a provocative podcast she’s since ended, and took a lot of Adderall. Despite – or maybe due to – the mythology around the community she cultivated, in November 2023, Levy packed up and moved home to L.A. “Obviously, there’s still some magic there. There’s magic everywhere where there are people ready and willing to feel the magic,” she reflects. “But I don’t know, you graduate places. I was a senior at Downtown Academy. I had to graduate.” This graduation metaphor is one Levy lives by: she thinks about life in four-year intervals, something she adopted from the schooling system and continued thereafter. “I need to calculate. If I finished college in June 2020, would I be a freshman again in a new school?” She confirms she’s correct. “Freshman year in the Swiss countryside writing. Freshman year of being a proper adult.” She adds in her thoughtful, yet somehow totally off-the-cuff, way, “One thing that is terrifying is that we’re always in the middle of making it”.

Levy tells me most of the stories in My First Book are written as a first-person character that’s “a worse, more performative, crazier version” of herself. But whether the wider internet can tell the difference is another question: the minute you release something into the world, you have no control over people’s perception of it. “That felt so logical when I was younger,” Levy says. “But now, even in this interview, I’m like ‘What am I going to sound like when I say this?’” She continues, “With my next book, I was worried people were going to perceive the character as me. It’s like, ‘No, I’m going to build it. I’m going to build a world’. And if they can’t stop talking about me, then I failed.”

At the end of Sad Girl Written in the Third Person, the narrator considers waking her parents up to ask them what they have made besides her. “If she [did], they’d ask why she smells like cigarettes and if she wants to get lung cancer and if she thinks she’s invincible or that smoking makes her interesting. She would tell them that, like them, she is dust, and she will return to dust. The question is what will remain.” On our call, Levy brings up another internet – or maybe it was real life – memory. “Somebody once said about somebody else, ‘Oh, they’re a footnote’, like they’re not an important person in history, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that would be so cool to be a footnote in history’.”

Feature images via Instagram.