Kristen Felicetti’s debut novel, LOG OFF, invites you to log on—to the secret Y2K LiveJournal entries of sixteen-year-old Ellora Gao. Divulging her thoughts about family, friendship, and music, Ellora’s diary becomes a bittersweet chronicle of self-discovery and the attempt to find connection, online and off.
In the interview below, I asked Kristen for her perspective on writing on the internet, writing about the internet, and related matters.
Stephanie Yue Duhem: As an inveterate diarist who also started exploring online communities around Y2K, I found your novel wonderfully evocative and tender in its treatment of that period of the internet. In a way, our generation and the internet came of age simultaneously, with writers hopping platforms as they rose and fell. At the end of LOG OFF, Ellora Gao stops using LiveJournal—but did you personally continue to experiment with other blogging or social platforms (e.g., Xanga, Tumblr, WordPress, Substack—even Twitter, where we met)?What have been some of your favorite platforms for writing and discovering community over the years?
Kristen Felicetti: Thank you for saying that about LOG OFF and the way it captures the awkward, earlyish period of the internet! The only entry in the book that’s based on something I wrote on my own LiveJournal is the entry where Ellora predicts the downfall of LiveJournal and lists the reasons why they will all one day move on to something else. I think even as a teenager I could feel this wasn’t going to last forever and that new platforms were coming. And I’ve been on so many of them over the years, not Xanga or WordPress, but Tumblr, Twitter, and Substack. I work at Substack now, and it feels like my life has come full circle. Whenever I see that “ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be on the computer a lot” meme, I’m like, lol, yes, I truly did.
And you know, people hate on Twitter, but I’ve liked many things about it. As you mentioned, it’s where we met, we probably wouldn’t be doing this interview if it wasn’t for it! And it’s where I met a lot of online writing people. But I think one of my favorite places for writing and discovering community was online lit mags. In the 2010s, there was a real golden era of people creating online or print magazines as well as websites and web presences for them. I had my print magazine, The Bushwick Review, and meeting editors of other magazines (including Lucy K Shaw, who later became the publisher of LOG OFF) was really how I first found any kind of lasting community. Twitter, Instagram, and other online platforms were all places to strengthen those bonds, as well as discover new writers and artists for the magazine.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the promises and faults of “the Internet Novel,” with many critics waving off the entire genre as trivial, uninteresting, or incapable of capturing the actual dynamism of the internet. What’s your take on this discourse? Can you describe some challenges that you personally ran into while trying to write the ethos of Y2K LiveJournal? Have there been other “internet novels” that you’ve admired or been inspired by?
Lol, I have a lot of opinions on this, one of them being that I feel completely annoyed at critics who dismiss internet novels as trivial or uninteresting. I feel like they’re dismissing it for the same reason some people look down on pop culture references in novels—they think it’s not literary enough or that the references will date the work very quickly, both of which are not true. A good novel is a good novel at the end of the day and you’re not going to lose someone because you mention Twitter or Instagram. Even if your reader is rarely online, and is unfamiliar with all the references, a writer can depict the experience so specifically that any reader will understand the ideas or feelings around them.
I do think there’s some truth to the fact that it’s difficult to capture the dynamism of the internet in a novel. One of the recent internet novels that I loved and does that well is Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This. The first half is so funny, and captures the attention-jumping, self-loathing feeling you can have while doomscrolling, and then crucially, the second half captures the feeling everyone has had to some degree, where something serious happens in your offline life, and that completely snaps you out of it. It wakes you up and makes you realize how silly you’ve been for obsessing about some weird online drama.
I also love Darryl by Jackie Ess. The short chapters feel like posts, but whatever they actually are, Darryl’s narration happens nearly immediately after the events he’s talking about, and there’s both earnestness and humor that comes from that lack of time for self-reflection. LOG OFF takes a similar approach to the narration, so I found that inspiring. I also love how Darryl has ties to one of the first great internet novels, The Sluts by Dennis Cooper.
A fun thread that runs through LOG OFF is Ellora’s “Current Music” status at the end of her LiveJournal entries. This was one of the only elements that prevented me from reading the book in one go—I kept wanting to stop and listen to the referenced songs. What was your process for picking the songs for her entries? Were they all old favorites, or did you end up discovering some new-to-you music along the way?
They were all songs or artists I already knew. Some of the entry choices are random, and others are used when Ellora directly references the song or artist in the entry itself, but sometimes I picked them because they fit the mood or content of what she was writing about on that particular day. Those entries / “Current Music” pairings are the ones I remember the most and have the most personal meaning. For example, Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” a song l love, and seems to always come on in party situations. Like, I’ve lost count of how many late-night drunken group sing-alongs of “Say It Ain’t So” I’ve been part of, and I imagine many American millennials would claim the same. When a song becomes a party anthem, you can often forget what its lyrics are really about, and somewhat ironically “Say It Ain’t So” is very unambiguously about generational alcoholism. So, when Ellora uses that song in her “Current Music,” I wanted to use it pointedly in an entry that dealt with multiple characters’ struggles with alcohol.
Ellora Gao establishes in her first LiveJournal entry that she’ll be anonymizing names. Later, one of the reasons she leaves LiveJournal is because it’s becoming too popular, and she doesn’t want her classmates discovering her writing. Today, there’s a lot of pointed disdain towards anonymous posters—sometimes understandably. But do you still see value in anonymity online, especially for young people who might be playing with persona while trying to figure out who they are?
Yes, I think there’s an inclination to go online and say I’m this and this and this, because people want to belong to something, but I love when someone is a little more ambiguous or playful about their identity online, especially when they might still be trying to figure out who they are. In general, as long as you’re not deliberately misleading someone, I think it’s fine to be a little more withholding or mysterious online, even if we’re not talking about being totally anonymous. In 2024, especially if you gain any sort of following, it would be hard to retain any type of true anonymity.
In your interview with Hurley Winkler in The Creative Independent, you mentioned that you yourself used LiveJournal more for visual art—photoshopped collages with song lyrics and poetry. Is there any way I can convince you to share an example or two of that old work here? Or any other pieces from past online lives?
Sadly, I’ve lost almost all of that work because those images were hosted on old websites or image hosting sites that don’t exist anymore. But I can find scraps of my old personal websites from that same era via the Wayback machine. Like this one:
It’s a graphic I made to honor an episode of The X-Files I liked called “Mind’s Eye.” I think what’s so early 2000s about this graphic is not just the aesthetic, but how you’d navigate to it on the site itself. My personal website was just this odd image map of various links, one of which was mindseye.html, and that graphic lived there. There was no other purpose for that page other than to display the graphic, nor any kind of explanation, lol. Then you’d either click through to the next .html page with another graphic or go back to explore more. In general, early 2000s site navigation was much more like wandering a museum or a dreamlike experience than it is today.
This question is kind of open-ended, but being Chinese American myself, I’m curious if and how you think the online experience (or communicating via machine) might have a different inflection for Asian Americans, especially Asian American women. I’m thinking about Franny Choi’s Soft Science, Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens, and Tao Lin’s early work incorporating gchat and emails. Is there a sort of racial typecasting that needs to be considered or navigated around (or through)?
While it’s been a few years, I have read all three of those books, and I think they occupy an interesting space in my mind, because, while I’m aware of their authors’ being Asian, and even that their characters or speakers deal with Asian issues, if I was asked today what those books were about, I would cite the tech/linguistic/internet aspect first, though I’m not sure those things are completely mutually exclusive. Soft Science makes me think about cyborgs and Alan Turing, Private Citizens deals with how tech has changed the Bay Area, and when I recall Tao Lin’s Taipei, what I think of most is the tone created by the book’s flat affect.
Growing up, there was always this negative stereotype of Asians being nerds, particularly around math and computers, and now, I feel there are so many Asian writers and artists, whose work deals with the internet, who have an image or persona that seems so cool, specifically because it is so vaguely techy. And while the idea of the “cool Asian” in any form has always been its own racial typecasting, I totally love that tech style, especially when I see it in Asian women, and probably consciously lean into some of those aesthetics myself.
I’m not even sure I answered your question, but I do think this is a fascinating one to consider, and I’d be interested in how you’d answer, as well as what people who are not Asian would say. Maybe you and I are just hyper-aware of it being Asian American, but it’s not something others would think about at all.
One last question. In my experience, many of us who grew up with teen diary sites like LiveJournal and Xanga went on to become—if not writers ourselves—at least ardent readers. Do you think the replacement of these text-based adolescent spaces with image and video-based media, like TikTok, bodes badly for literary culture in the future? How do you think the changing landscape of the internet might shape future readers and writers?
This is a big question, not sure I have any definitive answers. As a reader and writer, it’s hard not to feel some anxiety about the future of books, but I don’t think TikTok or other video platforms are particularly to blame. They’re just part of wider problems with the internet, smartphones, and especially, our culture, which feels increasingly fast and like everything must be multi-tasked. Most of the things I do on my phone are still text-based, but when I’m half reading a few articles at once, or doom-scrolling a feed, that feels terrible and not any better than watching videos. It also feels very far from the immersive conditions that are ideal for reading a book and certainly for writing one. I’m not saying anything new here; we know all these things.
Here are two things I do feel hopeful about. Wherever the landscape of the internet goes, there are always going to be people who love reading and there will always be literary culture, it’s just going to look different than it did in decades past. People do get fed up with screens and crave real world experiences, and tactile objects, including books. There are more independent bookstores in America than ever. There are a lot of great books being published, and many of those writers, especially those on indie presses, have connected with readers because of the internet.
The other thing I think is that writers shouldn’t write to chase our scattered attention span. In the past couple years, the books I’ve liked the most aren’t the ones trying to follow a Netflix algorithm. They’re the ones doing things that books do best and actually contradict all the noise—quiet interiority, a voice I wanted to be with forever, challenging ideas that I was aching to discuss with someone after, or mind-blowing wtf weirdness that expands the possibility of what I thought books, or any art form, could do.
Stephanie Yue Duhem is a poet in Austin, TX. She can be found online at www.sydpoetry.com.
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