Walking the wire between imagination and confession, “My First Book” captures both our cultural moment and the feeling of growing up in the internet generation. Debut author Honor Levy's uniquely riveting voice emerges from the chaos of coming of age in the 21st century, only having lived in a post-internet world. Never far from a digital interface, Levy's characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched world simultaneously hyper-real, hyper-performative, and on the brink of collapse. Amid the sense of imminent catastrophe, a fragile self struggles to form.
Wildly inventive, always ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of “My First Book” are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy's prose illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. "I'd rather do Xanax than cut myself. No, I'd rather do Xanax then cut myself," one protagonist muses, while another discovers the infinite nature of love, another reminisces about sunsets that were "pinker, like way pinker," and another encounters God in a downtown video game arcade. To find and keep faith is the order of the day-but how?
For readers of Patricia Lockwood, Bret Easton Ellis, and the depths of the internet, and for anyone who would like to see Generation Z from the inside out, “My First Book” holds the key. And in capturing the experience of an entire generation, it marks the arrival of an electric new talent.
