In their new books Parasocialite and American Narcissus, LA-based writers Brittany Menjivar and Chandler Morrison explore fame and fantasy in the Internet age, with a particular emphasis on life in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. They took to email to discuss everything from bizarre dreams to dating apps to the relationship between art and suffering.
Brittany: Hey Chandler! I'll start this off by contextualizing American Narcissus among your past works. You've previously been described as an "extreme horror" author, but American Narcissus feels like a step in a new direction. At times, it's violent or disturbing, and there are some otherworldly characters lurking in the shadows, but overall it reads like a sci-fi Less Than Zero to me. Would you consider American Narcissus horror? What exactly is your relationship with "horror" as a label and as a genre?
Chandler: Hey Brittany, great question. The “horror author” label has been one that’s followed me my entire career, but I’ve never identified with it. I wouldn’t categorize any of my seven previous books as horror in the traditional sense. Horrific things happen in them, but that’s never the point. To me, the real throughlines in my work are sad people with destructive tendencies, doomed romance, surrealism, and existential dread. In that sense, I think anyone who liked my other books will feel right at home within the pages of American Narcissus. The main difference is that there’s no necrophilia or cannibalism or people mutilating themselves with cheese graters. So, I also think that it’ll appeal to readers who’ve maybe shied away from my books in the past because they’ve seen a hundred TikTok videos about the abortion clinic threesome scene in Dead Inside. Like you said, there’s some horrific stuff in American Narcissus, but nothing that would be too much for someone who doesn’t like horror.
What about you? Were you thinking about labels at all when you wrote the pieces in Parasocialite? And do you find yourself thinking about labels differently now that the book is out and has started to be interpreted by readers? You have this sort of Babitz-esque it-girl vibe to you, but the mood of your book seems to defy that to an extent. It’s more complex. Haunted. Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath if she’d had a bit more of a glimmer in her eye.
Brittany: I didn't think about labels while writing Parasocialite, but they were definitely on my mind after the book was released. I was initially worried that it would be assigned a buzzword-y descriptor like "coquette literature" or pigeonholed as a "book for girls." Of course, it's anchored in the female perspective insofar as it's informed by my personal experiences, and I hope that women feel seen by it (especially when it comes to all the stories about objectification)—but I also want it to reach people who don't relate, or think that they won't relate but might be surprised. Even when dissecting the lives of girls and women, Parasocialite doesn't attempt to identify some intrinsic trait underpinning female existence—any discussion of gender roles is ultimately in service of a greater conversation about the politics of desire, beauty, and celebrity.
Romanticized, aestheticized depictions of a tragic girlhood are in vogue right now. Girlhood is all ribbons and schoolgirl skirts and tears that look like pearls, according to the Internet. To me, these depictions barely scratch the surface of the real thing, which is weird and complicated and sometimes absurd and sometimes creepy. I really appreciate your assessment—"haunted" is what I was aiming for. I was so thrilled and honored when Geoff Rickly described Parasocialite as a book in which "girlhood is sci-fi"—the characters are very much living with a warped sense of reality, bouncing between various utopias and dystopias. "Autofiction" is another label that's come up in discussions of my work. I don't mind it being applied to my stories, yet at the same time, none of the characters in Parasocialite are supposed to be me. I certainly draw upon events that have happened to me—for example, "Louis — In Memoriam" was inspired by my near-fatal car accident, and "The CW" is based on a creepy Bumble message I received. But there is a greater separation between my life and the book than some readers might believe.
I'd love to hear more about how you play with the boundaries between reality and fiction in your work. There's a character in American Narcissus named Chandler Eastridge—like you, he's a writer with a penchant for sunglasses, but he's also painted as an aloof jerk. What inspired you to incorporate Chandler Eastridge into the novel, and how closely does he resemble Chandler Morrison?
Chandler: There was this girl with whom I was romantically entangled sometime before I started writing American Narcissus, and she had a sort of skewed idea about what it means to be a novelist. She thought I was this big celebrity just because I have books in bookstores, and that I was rolling in untold riches.
“What a thing that must be for a person’s ego,” she said to me once. It didn’t matter how much I told her that I am not in fact some ultrarich celebrity; she had this idea in her mind about what it means to be CHANDLER MORRISON. And she teased me about it endlessly. She thought it was “so incredibly cringe to be a famous writer.” So, when I was writing the Chandler Eastridge/Tess Coover plotline in American Narcissus, I just keyed off this kind of fantastical dynamic she imagined we had.
It wasn’t until later drafts that I named the writer Chandler and gave him some traits people associate with me. He was initially just some rich, douchey writer named David. But as I was editing it, I realized that people were going to assume David was my imagined idea of myself, because many readers really struggle when it comes to separating fictional characters from their authors. And so I figured, fuck it, I’m just gonna load their gun for them and have some fun with it. They say you shouldn’t feed the trolls, but trolls are an essential component of the culture. They’re like those sucker-mouthed fish that latch onto sharks and eat bacteria, or whatever. Annoying and gross, sure, but ultimately necessary. The Chandler Eastridge character is an all-you-can-eat troll buffet. Trolls need a lot of calories, you know.
I know Parasocialite isn’t autofiction, but how often do you base other characters on real people? They all feel so alive and authentic, even when they make the briefest appearances on the page. I never assume the narrator is the author, but with your book, I did assume some of your other characters were at least informed by real-life counterparts, simply based on how organic and idiosyncratic they are.
Brittany: I totally get that—it can be fun to feed the trolls every now and then. Haters are an inevitable consequence of a life lived in the public sphere—it feels good to respond to them with a sense of playfulness rather than spite.
I base characters on real people all the time—not friends or family members, but people who exist on the periphery of my life in some way. (People I might be said to have "parasocial" relationships with, even.) Parasocialite gestures towards kids I knew in high school, dating app matches, and plenty of niche Internet microcelebrities. It also features two "dream poems" ("Three Dreams ft. Instagram Girls" and "a vision of heaven") in which I try to glean some greater understanding from celebrity encounters generated by my subconscious. Dreams provided a good deal of material for Parasocialite, now that I think about it—"Elephant Crossing" is inspired by a recurring dream I had throughout childhood, in which I would step outside my house and find my suburban neighborhood overrun with exotic animals. I used to have that dream without fail every couple of years—it's been a while now, but I'm hoping it'll come back eventually.
Some of the scenes in American Narcissus seem to abide by dream logic, from a run-in with a secretly sinister bartender to a conversation with a preternaturally beautiful janitor. What sources of inspiration do you tend to draw upon when delving into the surreal? Do your nightmares ever spark ideas for your novels, or are your dreams surprisingly mundane?
Chandler: My dreams tend to be a lot weirder than anything I ever write about. They're completely nonsensical and I often struggle to remember the details upon waking. But I've always been kind of a space cadet, and a lot of the surreal elements in my work just come from idle imaginings. And, like one of the main characters in American Narcissus, I did way too many hallucinogens when I was younger. That's had a lasting effect, and has really colored my perception of the world in various ways. I feel like the filter through which I experience life is a little bit broken. Things get in which perhaps should not. And other things which should get in may not make it across the threshold, or if they do, they come over...altered.
You mentioned dating apps, which are obviously featured in your book and have become a mainstay in the culture. The apps themselves—at least in my experience—foster a proliferation of parasocial relationships, in a way, because there's so much artifice and pretense. It's unnatural, the way we've allowed ourselves to be corralled into a pseudo-romantic landscape driven by technology and corporate greed. We're fictional characters on a screen, tumbling down the cold, black rabbit holes of cyberspace. There's something endlessly Ballardian about it. But I'm also older than you and I think a bit more cynical, so I'm curious about how you view dating apps in relation to your generation. I wholly recognize the possibility that I'm just old and out of touch, railing against a Brave New World that's here to stay, at least until we finally nuke it out of the cosmos.
Brittany: I feel the same way about online dating. Funnily enough, my partner and I met on Hinge, but we agree that the apps have the potential to pervert human interaction through commodification and gamification. When I was single, I had a dozen dating app conversations going at any given moment, overwhelmed by the wealth of choice the algorithm offered me. I swiped right on people I had no intention of meeting up with, essentially viewing boys who lived in Riverside or Anaheim as digital ghosts I could summon from the void when I was bored. Fun fact: after my car crash, I messaged a ton of Tinder boys telling them all the gory details, just to see what they would say. "wyd Britt?" "believe it or not i almost died like an hour ago." Ballard would have had a field day with that one...
I know you're a major Ballard fan. Crash is one of my favorite novels—I love how it zeroes in on the intersection of human connection and technology in a way that's clever and absurd without being overly obvious. (Imagine a version that replaces cars with phones or desktop computers... I shudder.) I'm also interested in the interaction between intimacy/eroticism and trauma/horror, especially as someone who formerly played an undead girl in a haunted house and had some bizarre guest interactions. What is it about Ballard's work that appeals to you? Is there anything about it that you aspire to emulate in your own writing?
Chandler: There are so many things I love about Ballard's work, but above all it's the clinical coldness of his style. I've always been attracted to austerity. My mother chided and discouraged any emotional expression when I was a kid, so from an early age I learned to idealize apathy. I was twelve or thirteen when I first read Crash, and it was a revelation. Everything is passed through this chilly surgical lens. The sex scenes read like automotive manuals. All the characters have the exact sort of flat affect I'd spent my life trying to perfect because I'd been taught that outward displays of intense feeling were impolite and gauche. And even now, all these years later and armed with the knowledge that my mom is and always has been a loony toon, I'm still drawn to Ballard's particular brand of taciturn distance. There are other elements of his work that I incorporate into my own, too—capitalism run amok, the understated satire, the sinister banality of the suburbs, his more Earth-bound flavor of science fiction—but more than anything it's the bitter, medicinal bite of his coldness to which I've continually aspired.
And it's funny you mention the "Crash with cell phones thing," because I have a bit of that in the novel I'm currently writing. I can't think of any piece of technology more eroticized in contemporary culture than the cell phone. It's shocking that it hasn't taken on a more phallic shape in recent years.
Were there any authors in particular who informed the distinct mood of Parasocialite? It's very much its own thing but I'd be curious to know who would turn up on its 23andMe results.
Brittany: "The sinister banality of the suburbs" is a recurring theme for me, too. I'm so excited to see what you'll do with the cell phone idea—I think it's a tricky one to handle, but if anyone can pull it off it's you. Marie Calloway's What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life definitely informed Parasocialite—more so ideologically than stylistically. I admire her ability to write so earnestly about the vicissitudes of adulation and desire, especially within an artist-to-artist context. I think the book also demonstrates that any situation, no matter how mundane, can be worthy of the page beneath a deft pen. If any of you readers know Marie, please forward this to her—I would love to say hi.
I'm inspired by authors who are able to integrate fantasy and absurdism into their first-person narratives rather than insisting upon conventional "play-by-play" storytelling structures—Alex Kazemi and Jack Skelley come to mind. Dennis Cooper's work has helped me feel free to explore the darker aspects of subcultures and parasocial relationships. Salinger is my number one author of all time, but I'm not sure if his influence shows up in my prose—although I do think his characters are defined by a spiritual sense of longing for "something more" that underscores much of my work.
I take a lot of inspiration from artists working in other mediums, as well. Atom Egoyan's films are a lodestone for me; I'm perpetually fascinated by the themes of obsession, surveillance, voyeurism, and exhibitionism he plays with. How about you—are there filmmakers, musicians, et cetera who have informed your artistic approach, especially when writing American Narcissus?
Chandler: I was thinking about Altman's Shortcuts, PTA's Magnolia, and Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars when I wrote American Narcissus. All of those movies capture something essential about the LA experience and I wanted to do something similar in terms of these separate but interwoven narratives. And Kubrick's entire filmography has informed my own body of work in a lot of ways, especially in respect to his distant chilliness that I like so much. I can relate to his hard-nosed, almost irrational perfectionism. I'll hammer and chisel at a sentence until it sounds exactly the way I want it to, but I often wouldn't be able to tell you what it is that I want. I just know I'll know when it's right.
Music is super important to my writing process, even though I don't listen to music when I'm actually writing—I need complete silence. A coffee shop writer I am not. But when I'm generating ideas, music is crucial. Lana Del Rey—on whom the sun rises and sets—is a big one for me, and most of my work after a certain point is kind of in conversation with hers. A huge part of my process involves driving around at night with her albums on a loop, or running to the point of delirium with her words blasting in my ears to the beat of my endorphin-choked blood. All of my best ideas come to me when I'm driving or running. I don't know if that signifies I'm moving toward something or away from it. It probably doesn't mean anything at all.
What does your process look like? You strike me as a coffee shop writer—someone who can write anywhere, irrespective of the conditions. I've always been envious of people who can do that.
Brittany: Lana Del Rey is eternally relevant to discussions of LA glamor and its inverse. I love that she gives listeners a space to be vulnerable—she gets a lot of hate for amping up the pathos, but I think it's so important for artists to explore the full range of human emotion.
Oh, I'm totally a coffee shop writer. I'm a major extrovert, so I get a lot of energy from being out and about—sometimes it's easier for me to focus in a crowded room than when I'm at home, alone with my thoughts. I don't limit myself to coffee shops—I've also written in diners, bars, and mall food courts. I would like to write in weirder places this year—maybe in a museum, perched above one of the canyons, or on the Santa Monica Pier.
And we find ourselves circling back to the City of Angels. Obviously the city is central to both of our books. What's your relationship with it? Love-hate, or just love? What about LA fascinates you, what hold does it have over you?
Chandler: Definitely love-hate, and most of the time it's just hate. The filth, the crime, the homelessness, the traffic, the horrible people...it's a dream that's curdled into a nightmare. Not to mention it's the loneliest place I've ever lived. It's so easy to disappear here.
But...there are moments that make it all worth it. For all the ugliness, there's such beauty. One often inhales them both in the same breath. There's a natural music to this place that you can't hear anywhere else. And even that dream-turned-nightmare fog that hangs over everything has its unique appeal. I'm drawn to juxtapositions like that. I see the city as sort of an externalization of my own depressive nihilism that's forever at odds with my hopeless romanticism.
I know you spend a fair amount of time in New York City and that you're pretty plugged into the scene there. I've only been to NYC once, and it was more than twelve years ago. Do you see New York and LA as extensions of one another in the classical Didion-Babitz sense, or has their relationship become something else altogether in recent years? And how does the New York literary scene compare or contrast to the one out here?
Brittany: I get what you mean about the music and the fog—there's something otherworldly about Los Angeles and the West Coast at large, and that quality is what keeps drawing me back in. The landforms in particular are so stunning to me. Coming from suburban Maryland, I'm not used to mountains, canyons, deserts, expanses of ocean, all to such great scale and within such proximity. I always say they make me feel like a Transcendentalist experiencing the Sublime.
Funny you should send me this now—I just got back from New York yesterday. I wish I could come up with the perfect platitude to explain some cosmic synchronicity or disconnect between the two, but the truth is I'm still trying to figure it out myself. Growing up, New York was the ideal "big city" to me. When I was eight years old, my parents took me to the American Girl Doll store for spring break; in high school, I would go on field trips there with the theater department, and in college, I would crash there weekend after weekend to hang with childhood friends who had ended up at NYU and Columbia. LA remained a far-off fantasy to me—the subject of "[Character] goes Hollywood" TV specials and songs on the radio. Even having lived here for a couple years now, I still feel that there's something elusive about this city. Going back to New York, I'm always surprised by how much muscle memory I've retained—I know which subway stops to get off at, which intersection is coming up next, which store is around the corner. Going back to LA, I have to ask myself, "What's my building's gate code again?" There are mysteries here I've yet to solve.
I can say this: in New York, I always seem to stumble upon interesting people, places, and events. I walk down the street and end up chatting with strangers; I go to one reading and a friend whisks me away to another. In LA, I find myself making a more concerted effort to discern what's up and what I'm doing. I think this is mainly because of the infrastructure of the city itself—it's so massive and reliant on cars, so carrying out plans requires intention. This can be nice, though—it's good to be intentional about quality time with people you care about.
Turning toward literary matters, I do note some differences between the LA and New York scenes. What stands out to me about the LA scene is how welcoming it is—after my first reading, I felt so embraced by the local artistic community, from event organizers to gallery owners to other authors. What stands out to me about the New York scene is how dedicated to not just writing, but literature everyone is—I always walk away from the city with a renewed sense of determination to work on whatever project I've got going, plus a list of reading recommendations. I'm honored to know brilliant writers in both cities—I wish I could teleport between the two, honestly. I have so many New York writer friends I'm eager to spend more time with.
What's your approach to literary friendships? Is it important to you to have friends who are also writers? If so, how do you typically go about meeting them?
Chandler: It's more important to me to have friends who aren't writers. We're not exactly the most well-adjusted class of people. We're neurotic and solipsistic and we spend an inordinate amount of time living in imaginary realities. A group of writers is capable of creating the most insufferable kind of echo chamber. As a person active in the creative arts, it's so easy to lose touch with the world and the people in it. I think it's crucial for us to balance our time with people who come from different walks of life, and who view the world differently than the way a writer would.
That being said, I adore my writer friends. Most of them, anyway. But I never really seek out writer friendships; they sort of just happen by accident, whether it's via the internet or at one of the (selectively few) literary events I happen to attend. I'm often initially skeptical of other writers, because so much of the writing/publishing business is transactional. Part of it is that I'm jaded and cynical and pathologically guarded, but my first assumption is always that they want something from me. But I'm so grateful for the ones who surpass that initial suspicion and end up becoming real friends. Just as it's important to surround yourself with people who have different experiences, it's also important to have people who can relate to you on a really visceral level. I can't exactly talk to my retail manager friend about how I made myself stay awake for five straight days just so I could accurately write a couple paragraphs from the POV of someone suffering from insomnia.
On that note, I'm curious if you struggle at all with your creative process, because I've never been able to write effectively without torturing myself to some degree. At the risk of sounding like a stereotype, I have to suffer in order to get inspired. If it doesn't hurt, I can't use it. There's obvious pain within Parasocialite, but there's also a lot of levity and hope. I'd be interested to know if—and how--you're able to tap into all of that without resorting to the self-destructive measures on which I rely.
Brittany: I get that. As much as I do get excited about connecting with other writers (especially those I've admired for a while), I'm forever grateful for my friends from different "scenes" and career fields. The writing and art worlds, particularly in NY and LA, can be so insular and rife with drama—it's good to be reminded that they're not the end-all-and-be all.
Writing can indeed be an arduous process for me. The concept of "turning pain into art" has definitely been attractive to me over the years—especially when I've had a reserve of pain to alchemize. Of course, the downside of this mentality is what you describe—feeling that without pain, good art can't exist. I grappled with all of this in my short film, "Fragile.com." The short follows a teenage girl who livestreams herself crying on a shady website—both for money, and to gain the affection of the site's charismatic manager. Many have taken it to be an allegory for sex work or extreme fetishes, but when I wrote it, I was honestly thinking about the lengths we artists go to in order to produce work and stay relevant. When I'm locked in on a project, I can sit at my laptop for hours and hours without stopping. Once I'm in the zone, it can be hard for me to drag myself out—even if I've been grinding for 12 hours straight; even if I'm starting to fall asleep; even if I'm not in a generative headspace anymore. Over the years, I've gotten increasingly better at listening to my body and using its cues to guide my process. Sometimes taking a nap really is the best way to improve your productivity in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, physical and mental exhaustion can be easier to treat than emotional exhaustion. When I'm dealing with a topic that takes a lot out of me, I sometimes find that zeroing in on style—for example, leaning into satire, absurdism, or wordplay—can help mediate the intensity of the matter. On the macro level, I also like to motivate myself by reminding myself of all the joys that come with sharing my work—seeing a short story or article on a publication's homepage, signing a stack of books at a reading, getting tagged in a meme, having conversations like this one. All of these things make the struggle worth it for me.
