Parasocial Graces: A Walk in the Americana Mall with Brittany Menjivar
Claudia Elena Rodriguez and Brittany Menjivar hang out and discuss autofiction, J.D. Salinger, the early internet, and Brittany's debut collection PARASOCIALITE.
There are fake trees in the Apple store
And a 30-year-old woman on a bicycle
Just rode into the closed doors of Brandy Melville
There is blood on the floor
I’m no longer a child
I don’t want to go back to Maryland
—Brittany Menjivar, “California”
I must confess. My reasons for conducting this interview were purely selfish. I wanted to know if I knew Brittany Menjivar as well as I felt I did.
The first time I met Brittany was smoking cigarettes outside of Sammy Loren’s reading series Casual Encounters. Neither of us were reading but introduced ourselves to one another as writers anyway. We followed each other on Instagram and since then, I’ve watched story after story as she built her own reading series in Los Angeles, Car Crash Collective (co-hosted by Erin Satterthwaite), taking it to New York and more recently, Berlin. At an art gallery, I saw her read from the comment sections of Lana Del Rey YouTube videos. When Brittany announced the title of her debut collection, Parasocialite, it felt fitting, almost regal—an appropriate title bestowment.
Why do I feel like I know Brittany when I’ve only met her twice in person? Is it because we’re both East Coast suburban transplants, aspiring to be writers and filmmakers at the end of history? Is it because of our shared Catholic upbringing? Maybe because we’re near the same age, growing up slowly and then all too fast in the digital age. Perhaps, but not quite. Brittany’s writing makes you feel like you know her, even if it’s just scribbles on Instagram. I’ve watched her move through the crevices of our online world with the grace of a ballerina, even when confronting the darkness. The answer to why I felt I knew her lay in the text of Parasocialite, where she offers us the mirror that makes our blemishes look like beauty marks.
We met up on a rainy Saturday afternoon at the Glendale Galleria, three days after Brittany returned from her reading in Berlin. We walked through Nordstrom and Barnes & Noble, talking about how much we love malls but hate escalators—we’d both seen this really graphic picture on the internet of a woman whose leg got stuck in one, and it haunts us both anytime we’re forced to ride one. We ended up at the Capital One Cafe, where we sat down to talk over chocolate chip cookies and sparkling water.
Claudia Elena Rodriguez: How was your trip to Berlin?
Brittany Menjivar: Berlin was so much fun. I think the most exciting part of Berlin was that I also got to hang out with other authors and host a Car Crash reading. It was at a bookstore called Tinker and Borrow. So I spent a lot of time hanging out with writers, getting coffee, and running around the city. One of my favorite things about it was that it seems to just be a part of the culture that people go to the state library and just hang out and work on their projects together. It’s called the Stabi. I became indoctrinated into that.
CER: What’s different in the literary scene stateside as opposed to overseas?
BM: That was the first question I asked a lot of the writers there. It seems that everyone there is really, really dedicated to their craft and has a lot of passion for it. There’s also a lot of state funding for projects which is really cool. But it doesn’t seem that there’s a literary community in the way of everyone running into each other and knowing each other, the way it seems to exist in LA.
CER: I read this Patricia Highsmith quote about how writers in Europe love to get around and talk about their craft but how American writers would much rather keep their work to themselves.
BM: Interesting. I’m definitely the kind of person who tends to surround myself with creators. One of my best childhood friends is a DJ. My boyfriend is a fashion designer. When I’m hanging out with another creative person, even if writing is not their outlet of choice, they always inspire me to see my own work in a new light which I really appreciate. Above all else, I just love having people who challenge me. It pushes me to dedicate myself more.
CER: Do you ever worry about being a part of a literary scene affecting who you’re for? What’s the audience in your mind?
BM: I don’t know if I ever write with an audience in mind, just sort of questions I want to explore. Typically, I either start with an issue that won’t leave my mind or a very vivid image. Writing “Animal Abuse,” I had this very vivid memory of walking around the mall as a little kid with my mom and a PETA spokesperson came up to me and just started shoving all these pamphlets for kids in my face. I liked the idea of graphic imagery imposing itself upon a location that’s very mundane or a place where people go for leisure. I typically don’t start out with a message I want to spell out for the reader, I kind of just want to create this environment and roam around it.
Q: How would you describe Parasocialite as a sensory experience?
A: The plastic smell of walking into a Claire’s or a Hot Topic.
CER: It seems that you start writing from a visual, sensory place. How would you describe Parasocialite as a sensory experience?
BM: The plastic smell of walking into a Claire’s or a Hot Topic.
CER: One of my favorite things about your writing in the book is the way you utilize references. There’s a poem named for Argento’s Phenomena, and one I really liked was about the girl who got a job giving tours at MOMA that was so moved by a painting, she kind of became a phenomenon and work of art herself. When was the last time you felt that moved by any kind of art?
BM: I think that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. A lot of the seeds for these stories are just things I’ve jotted down in my phone. I need to think about that for a second. Art as in visual?
CER: I think any kind of art. Just something that moved you, not necessarily inspired. Like when was the last time something made you feel the way the character feels looking at the art.
BM: Can we come back to this one?
CER: What’s an idea you’ve been ruminating on these days?
BM: I’ve been thinking a lot about the bizarre political environment of 2016. Not just the Trump election but everything surrounding it. Like the end of the Obama administration and how that felt as a teenage girl in the DC area, running into members of the Obama family in relative frequency. I grew up in Montgomery County, just outside of DC, so there were a lot of kids from political families. I had this one substitute teacher in high school who was later exposed as neo-Nazi. He was Richard Spencer’s right-hand man. He helped plan Charlottesville. You can see him in photos with tiki torches. That was revealed after I’d graduated, but there was always this weird thing about him. He was so secretive. He would make all these edgelord comments, like one girl asked for a book recommendation and he said, “How about you read Mein Kampf?” I’m trying to figure out how to unpack that and position it in a story, but I’m also thinking about the backdrop of creepy clowns that was underscoring the entire era, all these instances of people dressing up as clowns and pulling scary pranks. A high school in our district even had a clown bomb threat and shut down for the day. American Horror Story: Cult really synthesized all those elements with the horror iconography of the killer clowns speaking to the greater political horror and unrest of the time. I want to do a piece digging into that a little more.
CER: Who’s your favorite dead author or poet?
BM: Definitely J.D. Salinger. I posted that on the Car Crash Instagram stories and got subtweeted by someone saying, “If this is your favorite author, maybe you shouldn’t be running a reading series.” Because it’s too obvious, or whatever. I think that’s so silly. I think classics, not always but oftentimes, are classics for a reason. There are so many reasons I love J.D. Salinger. I feel like since I’m so into exploring these sigma male archetypes or troubled boys, people would assume Catcher in the Rye is my favorite. But I’m really attached to his Glass family short stories, and Nine Stories. I’m very interested in the way he explores spirituality within his characters. I reread “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” basically every month. I think in the 2080s or 2090s Catcher in the Rye will enter the public domain. I know because I’ve looked this up a million times. I hope I’m still around and kicking because I want to direct the adaptation.
“I feel like since I’m so into exploring these sigma male archetypes or troubled boys, people would assume Catcher in the Rye is my favorite. But I’m really attached to [J.D. Salinger’s] Glass family short stories, and Nine Stories. I’m very interested in the way he explores spirituality within his characters. I reread ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ basically every month.”
CER: What about living?
BM: I’ve been getting really into Dennis Cooper lately. I just tore through The Sluts in like three hours. That novel is very invested in the themes I enjoy. It’s all about parasocial obsession and trying to develop a sense of self-importance by attaching yourself to somebody else’s story. There’s a whole subplot about a thread of guys who are obsessed with killing Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys. The dark side of the internet, taboo desires, those are all things I love to explore. And I think that is the answer to your question about what’s moved me—I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
CER: What’s your Internet origin story?
BM: When I was very young, my parents censored a lot of what I had access to. I wasn’t even allowed to go on Club Penguin as a child. But I loved Pixie Hollow and WebKinz. My first experience of online community was going onto very specific forums. In particular I was a really big fan of the Nancy Drew PC games, which sounds super niche but actually has a really big and active community. I spent a lot of time posting on the forums, reviewing games as I played them. I guess it was a stepping stone to critical writing. I really enjoyed posting my hot takes and seeing how the public reacted to them. I think one of my most vivid memories, what interested me so much about the fandom, were the dynamics amongst the Nancy Drew fans. There was a fundamentalist Christian faction of Nancy Drew fans, a subset of Wiccan Nancy Drew fans. And anytime a game vaguely mentioned something tangentially related to Voodoo or the occult, the Christians would come out and say “Don’t play game 22, it’s sinful” or whatever. Then the witchy Nancy Drew fans would be like, “Actually, I’m a practitioner of the dark arts and this is why your post is disrespectful,” and then the mods would have to come shut it down. I was really fascinated by how those arguments could start so quickly and snowball to the point where five recurring characters kept chiming in to have the last word. And I was also on American Girl doll forums a lot. Love talking about the Girls. Samantha, Kit, Molly. Samantha was my girl. I think there’s been a lot of recent hate for Samantha because she’s the stuck up rich girl of the bunch. Then I got a Tumblr and Pinterest when I was a teen and mostly just used those to reblog photos of icons from the sixties. Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, The Shrimpton Sisters.
CER: You can choose to keep this a mystery or not, but does Parasocialite center on one speaker, or are there alternating perspectives throughout?
BM: Most of the poems in Parasocialite have me or someone very similar to me as the speaker. That doesn’t mean that everything in there is factual. But I would say the poems are more grounded in my experience and emotional truth. A lot of the short story characters are similar to me in circumstance or their feelings about the world, but they’re definitely not me. They don’t speak the way I do, or do the things I would.
CER: Would you call it autofiction?
BM: Ohhh, that’s a juicy question. I think Parasocialite is autofiction insofar as a lot of fiction tends to adopt themes and events from the writer’s life. There are a lot of stories that appropriate real things that happened to me. Most notably, “Louis in Memoriam”—I semi-famously did get into a very similar car crash in college. But the rest of what happens to that character doesn’t align with my experience. “Boring Night” draws upon my early experiences on Tinder as an 18-year-old trying to figure out how other people, older guys, more experienced guys, perceived me. There are definitely a lot of stories that bear no resemblance to my real life, that take drastic narrative jumps that originated from my own mind and musings more than anything that has actually happened to me.
CER: How do you even define autofiction today?
BM: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think it was Christian Lorentzen who said he defines it as more of a metatextual or metafictional work, where there’s an acknowledgment of the author creating the story. I think that’s an interesting definition. Autofiction is an enigmatic concept. I always think about this interview with Joe Jonas where he was talking about the song “Cake by the Ocean.” They were asking him what that meant. He said it was a catchall phrase, like you can apply it to whatever you want. Anything that happens to you, that’s cake by the ocean. I feel like autofiction and cake by the ocean are the same at this point.