Per Penguin Random House, Honor Levy’s My First Book was: “A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Good Morning America, W, Nylon, SheReads, and LitHub”. Here’s the publisher’s synopsis:
Walking the wire between imagination and confession, My First Book marks the arrival of an electric new talent. Honor Levy’s uniquely riveting voice emerges from the chaos of coming of age in Generation Z. Never far from a digital interface, her characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched society on the brink of collapse.
Inventive, ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of My First Book are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. [...]
Speaking of “walking the wire between imagination and confession”, Levy’s “Internet Girl” opens with the 11-year-old narrator alone in her bedroom “on a safari on the internet”. She described herself as “little” but “hungry” and “free” yet “empty”; thus, she breaks past the MacBook’s “parental controls”.
I’m eleven. I’m on Safari on a safari on the internet after school in my bedroom on my computer, my 2006 Apple MacBook Intel Core Duo 2.0 White 2 Ghz/2GB Memory Laptop Computer. I’m alone. I get past the parental controls. I am so hungry to know what’s out there. It’s 2008 and I am so little and so free and so empty and there are 186,727,854 websites on the internet.
Suddenly, she’s viewing porn - the “Two Girls and One Cup” video, then she’s smiling into a webcam at: “a man and a boy and a love and a stranger”, and she browses to Deviant Art where she learns about sex.
The pre-teen narrator shared:
In Shadow Kiss, the third installment of the Vampire Academy series, the protagonist, [≈17-year-old] Lissa Dragomir, breaks all the rules and ends up naked in bed with the gorgeous [≈24-year-old] Dimitri Belikov. I wonder what exactly it is that they do in bed. I wonder when it will happen to me. When I have a question I Google it.
Consequently, among other inquiries, she Googled: “How many calories in cum?” And another consequence of reading vampire books is that she wanted to be “wanted” and “BE BEST”.
Subsequently, after middle school and alone, she safaried to, what could only be, Omegle, a website that allowed users to video chat, without registering, with randomly chosen strangers.
I’m chatting with strangers, random strangers, bad scary men in the blue light. But I’m not afraid because they are in their blue light and I am in mine. It’s after school and I’m alone. I give them my age, sex, location. They give me theirs.
After exchanging pleasantries, she volunteered to play the [Omegle] game, where a (pre-teen) contestant could earn points by being salacious. For example:
Level 1: Smile
Level 2: Show Tongue
Level 3: Suck a Finger
Level 4: Show Panties
Level 5: Take Top Off
Level 6: Show Boobs
Level 7: Take Off Panties
Level 8: Insert 1 Finger
Level 9: Insert More Fingers
The narrator started playing by showing her tongue and ended the game, a winner, in the nude.
We play a game. It’s a game you may have played too. One point for showing my tongue. Another for showing my bare feet. Flash the camera for five points. Take off our shirts for more. Twirl around the room and so on and so on until I am naked and I have won.
Like so many schoolgirls who have volunteered over the years to play The Omegle Game, the narrator knew that men found pleasure in seeing her nude body, and she found pleasure in winning - being the best.
I do not feel dirty or guilty or embarrassed or cheated. I read the vampire books. I knew that the stranger found pleasure in seeing me naked. I played the dress-up games and the dress-down games. I was happy to be his paper doll. I wondered if he knew. I wondered if he understood that I found pleasure in winning, that I was the best. It was a fair trade, like Ritz for Oreos [...] like the time before parental controls for the time after.
Interestingly, The Paris Review referred to Levy as “the voice of a generation”. In the “Encounter” section of The Cut (May 3, 2024), Brock Colyar shared: “I was sent an advance copy [of Levy’s My First Book] and found it often quite adept at capturing our generation [...]” And, as for Levy’s “Internet Girl”, NPR related: [In “Internet Girl”] Levy’s portrayal of her narrator’s interiority is both compellingly satirical and frighteningly plausible [...]”
Plausible is correct, as thousands of girls have won on Omegle. For example, David Alm related in The Big Feature on Mother Jones (November 4, 2022) that Alauna, an “olive-skinned” 12-year-old with “blond hair and blue eyes”, shared “dozens of images and a video [...] sometimes naked in provocative positions” “with up to 30 men, most of whom she’d met on a chat platform called Omegle.” After her phone was taken away: “Alauna was furious.” And, “She freaked out.” Consequently, Alauna snuck into her mother’s bedroom: “[...] found an old cell phone, and got back on Omegle.”
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