When Honor Levy was 21, fresh out of college and at the height of the COVID lockdown, The New Yorker published one of her short stories, “Good Boys.” Already a luminary among alt-lit circles, Levy emerged into the muddled world of book deals and publication deals. She was dubbed the leading literary voice of Generation Z.
Now, in My First Book, her aptly titled debut collection of short stories, Levy delivers a finely crafted package of what it’s like being a zoomer (Gen Zer), complete with the existentialism, narcissism, and nihilism genetically ingrained among young adults who’ve grown up on the internet. With sharp observational and cutthroat writing skills reminiscent of literary idols like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Bret Easton Ellis, Levy at once portrays the idiosyncrasies of her generation as both an insider and an outsider. She lays bare everything that is shameful, embarrassing, and frightening about Gen Z. This isn’t the generation of Greta Thunberg, Amanda Gorman, or Emma Gonzalez. This is the generation that profits off vanity, scrolls after sex, and thinks “cutting is healthier than Xanax.”
When a zoomer picks up a copy of My First Book, they’ll be shocked that the culture they’re reading about is so intrinsically familiar yet dizzyingly appalling that it will be like exposing the strands of their DNA. Or as one Goodreads reviewer put it, “I didn’t even know I knew all of these things.”
In 16 short stories that are structurally playful and cheekily droll (bookmarked with ASCII art), Levy explores doomed relationships, a life post-nuclear war, God, algorithms, emotional futility after an abortion, drugs (“Coke is for millennials, for Patrick Bateman, for capitalists. Ketamine is for Gen Z and it’s legal and I have a prescription”), the digital self, and more. In “Love Story,” Levy depicts the strange and masochistic ways Gen Zers fall in love with each other. With writing that is genetically in tune with the vernacular of her generation (“He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waif. They scrolled into each other”), two star-crossed lovers come to terms with finding love, perhaps for the first time in their lives, without actually meeting physically. Virtual courtships aren’t unique to Generation Z, but in this retelling you grimace as you learn it’s taking place on her phone while she’s having dinner with her parents at Olive Garden. (“He messaged her, I wish you were real lol and she replied, sometimes I don’t feel real and he replied, lmao.”)
These are the consequences of such a digitally-drenched life, where GIFs, emojis, nudes, and memes are symbolic attributes of a person’s wants, needs, and emotional state. And they are also a language. But these bizarre behavioral nuances feel less about hormonal glitches and more about a generation whose culture is driven by loneliness, existential despair, the threat of climate change, hyper-polarization, suicidal ideation, school shootings, and dating apps. Kids of the 80s may have had the Satanic cult, but they never had the internet.
Perhaps one of the most surprising and refreshing takes is Levy’s own daring and pointed critique of society. It’s an unexpected note, neither sour nor sweet, but thorny and declarative, she decries much of what Gen Z has contributed to the polarized political discourse, or what is better known as woke culture. In “Cancel Me,” Levy dismantles the logic of cancel culture. In “Z was for Zoomers,” she dissects terms like “based” and “virtue signaling,” destabilizing their self-righteous politics, now rampant on the internet and increasingly popular on The Hill.
“Based means different, and in our homemade cyber echo chambers, to lean towards the right has become an act of radicalism,” she writes. Elsewhere she mentions that “the idea of the spectrum is something that we are asked to accept and bow down to and never insult. To insult a spectrum makes one racist or sexist or homophobic or fascist or evil.”
Generation Z has become so in tune with the demands and expectations of left-wing idealism that it often feels near impossible to decry the moral hypocrisies of identity politics. (They’re increasingly vilified by the media, older politicians, and are often the punchline to scathing jokes.) In the last decade, performative activism, faux sincerity and sentimentality have left gaping loopholes in political effectiveness, and “feelings became facts at some point between 2016 and now.” You might be servicing the agenda of a minority, but is posting an image on Instagram or re-tweeting a hashtag on Twitter/X really changing the world? Why are you raging so hard on the internet?
“Virtue signaling, as we know it in our digital and academic Gen Z circles, is the practice of showing you care, but without putting in any other work. I care, and I want you to know that I care, because maybe that will make you care about me.”
Levy, a zoomer herself, takes a stand against the biggest pitfalls of her generation, highlighting how such a politically vocal group of people is in many ways destabilizing its own political agency. The corridors of academic institutions are often rich with talk and chatter about Che Guevara and Karl Marx, figures turned idols by professors seeking to invigorate curious students. It’s quite common to find young people in a mood of anti-capitalism, socialist inebriation that often blatantly disregards basic human rights or practical economics. Society brushes it off though, attributing it to the youthful ignorance of being unemployed and having an education paid for by parents. Levy subtly nudges towards this reality in “Shoebox World,” a sharply written story about a codependent, emotionally abusive relationship struggling to survive its own prison. The love depicted is addictive and destructive (“When people say they like candy I want to ask them, have you tried Adderall? When people say they like Adderall I want to ask them, have you tried being in love?”) and yet its participants cling to it with as much fervor as they cling to the idea of the revolution. (“What if we dropped out of school and ran away? What if we joined the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency? What if we died for the cause? Or first, let’s move to Bushwick.”) Wise within her own cohort, Levy knows how the innocence and naivety of young love may deprive one of common sense, and she’s bold to suggest that a communist revolution is as real and surreal as a perfect love — theoretically attainable but physically impossible. With time and age, some of our innocent delusions fracture under the harsh, white light of capitalism and individualism. Best to keep the shoebox closed and sheltered under the bed.
Symbolic protesting or pledging allyship on social media platforms is as consequential as swatting away a fly in an effort that leads to its extinction. In “Hall of Mirrors,” Levy recounts her experience visiting the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles and how its magnetic popularity eventually led to the contamination of a river in Hoosick Falls, New York. She draws from her experience of volunteering in an after-school program to suggest the ways justice for the most needy is ineffectively applied.
“Why did I get to eat Nutella on a field trip to Paris while these kids have to stuff tuna sandwiches in their bags because they don’t have food at home? Why did I have to write a sentence so on the nose? Shouldn’t there be rules to ensure food access and a clear clean river and time to clip your child’s nails?”
But above all else, I want to emphasize that Levy is a clever and funny writer. It takes a certain kind of reader who, with a cultured eye, will understand the wordplay when she says “She was posted up, sleeping beauty GIF, a maiden in an unmade bed, posting, Just a Girlboss Building her Empire, I’m Rotting Here. Why? He replied. IDK, and she did decay like a time-lapse of a rotting fox GIF.” But there are also other precious lines like “I had to throw up. I had my toes painted magenta. I had to grow up” or “rage is an energy, like wind in a turbine or sun on a panel or water in a wheel. If we can harness it, then maybe we can save ourselves.”
Although this is a collection of short “stories,” they’re practically essays or personal nonfiction. It’s not autofiction because this is Levy cosplaying as Levy. In at least three stories, the narrator really wants to have a baby but acknowledges that she can’t because she really shouldn’t. (“She wants to have a baby and she wants to write a book.”) In at least two stories, the narrator makes reference to her radical political stances (in “Written by Sad Girl in the Third Person” she writes “She thinks identity politics are a bad idea”), makes multiple references to faith and praying, and in another two essays, the narrator admits to once having wished for a diary with a lock. It’s apparent that the major throughline in all these stories is the narrator herself, or Honor Levy. I don’t feel I’m making a preposterously audacious claim because in the first essay, “Love Story,” Levy includes login credentials with a username (“honor.baby/lovestory”) and a password (“iloveyou!”) right below the title page. It’s as if this diary with a lock that she’s been writing in for so long was actually stored on her “2006 Apple MacBook Intel Core Duo 2.0 in White,” and her way of publishing it was simply handing over the key, aka her login credentials.
When she cunningly titles her debut My First Book, you get a sense that she’s subtly winking at the cynics who say Gen Z is unhealthily spoiled. (Should we expect My Second Book in about a year and a half or so?) It’s also an affirmation of how self-aware this entire book is. It knows its nature is purely diaristic and confessional and, at times, knows precisely who its reader is. (“She will never be Joan Didion; she doesn’t quite know that yet.”) In “Z was for Zoomer,” Levy tries to make amends with the absurdity of Gen Z’s linguistic idiosyncrasies by reminding the older folks that “I’m sure you remember being filled with this brief and powerful and perfect feeling. The feeling that you and your friends and everyone your age are the most important people in the world.”
It seems Levy’s branded her own style of writing and feels quite comfortable within a certain cadence and language that, at times, borders surrealism. Metaphors aren’t her strength, but her articulation seems to be doing a fair lot. Despite the surplus of anaphoras and a few wilting essays, her voice is sincere and confident. In near-superb proportion, Levy draws from Woolf’s melancholia, Sylvia Plath’s existential dread, and Didion’s early adulthood sentimentality to extract some very cold but relevant truths about the society in which we live in and the next generation of leaders. It’s easy to predict a future in which literary nerds, aspiring writers, sociologists, and culturally curious individuals will come across My First Book and find the holistic emotional truth about this zeitgeist that most novels, movies, or other artistic endeavors might get blisteringly wrong.
[Published by Penguin Press on May 14, 2024, 224 pages, $27.00 US hardcover]