It Was Just a More Empathetic Time Online

Lexi Kent-Monning interviews Kristen Felicetti about her new novel, “Log Off.”

By Lexi Kent-MonningOctober 29, 2024

• Fiction

KRISTEN FELICETTI HAS DONE the impossible: she wrote a great book about the internet. Log Off (Shabby Doll House, 2024) is narrated entirely through LiveJournal entries written by a teen girl living in Upstate New York, who is navigating her way through the early 2000s. It’s uncanny how the novel embodies the time and place of self-expression in the early days of the internet and social media, the search for community online alongside the struggle to find the same offline, and the evergreen Herculean task of existing as a teenage girl.

Kristen is no stranger to all of these elements: the Rochester-based writer founded the literary and art magazine The Bushwick Review and serves as the head of support at Substack, which has become a refuge and place of ownership for independent writers. I first met Kristen as we both began logging on to writer Chelsea Hodson’s Morning Writing Club every weekday at 8:00 a.m. before signing on to our tech jobs. Her unique voice rose through the Zoom chat and immediately struck me—she has that rare ability to type the way she speaks, her humanity present in every word, despite the medium. She frequently offers help to writers with their Substacks when she’s being interviewed or doing her own readings for her book. This is a writer who constantly feeds her community, always opening the circle to others.

We talked about her earliest online experiences, the distinctive form of Log Off, the ingrained memories of the early 2000s, AI, and Fiona Apple back and forth through—what else?—a shared Google Doc.

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LEXI KENT-MONNING: Log Off is based in 2000–01, and its form is LiveJournal entries written by the narrator, Ellora, but so much of it feels timeless to me. Though the venues change over the years (Tumblr, Twitter/X, Substack), you really tapped into elements of “being online” that still apply today, like when Ellora gets an email bounce-back after trying to get in touch with someone she’d been regularly corresponding with previously: “My first morbid thought was that something happened to her […] but she probably just changed her email address, like I had. Still, I felt a small grief over the fact that I’d probably never be able to connect with her or find her again. My first Internet friend.” Now, it’s like when someone deletes their Instagram account or simply stops updating it, and you’re left wondering about them. Do you remember your first online friend? Are you still in touch with them?

KRISTEN FELICETTI: I don’t remember a specific individual who became my first online friend, but the first people I connected to online were via a Fiona Apple mailing list called “The Voice,” and later, LiveJournal and personal websites. In my twenties, I lost touch with everyone from LiveJournal, but one of the more emotional things that has happened from this book is that I’ve been able to reconnect with a couple of people from those days. I feel so tender toward everyone from that time and proud to see the adults they’ve become.

You and I both came of age during a specific time in technology when making friends online wasn’t as common, and was seen as nerdy. In fact, Ellora keeps her online friendships secret from her school friends, until one of them, Christopher, does what she can’t imagine doing: meets up with an online friend in real life. Now it’s much more commonplace, and I’m wondering about your thoughts on how the perception of online friendship has shifted over the years.

Over the years, there has become much less distinction between online and offline friendship for me. It’s all just friendship. That being said, when asked how they met, friends who have originally met on the internet will always have a unique origin story. It’s not seen as nerdy anymore, but there is still something different about saying you met someone through Tumblr versus saying you went to college together. When I hear other people say that, it’s less about online/offline than about how it signifies you had an intense interest, whether that was writing or gymnastics or a video game, that you actively sought community for. I relate to that, obviously.

Something that stands out to me, living in the LiveJournal world of Log Off, is how everything on that platform was so completely based on feelings. People were really using it as a genuine diary! And it felt like a safe thing to do emotionally! This part of being online feels pretty far away to me now—how about you? At one point, when switching from making a pro–Al Gore video to an anti–George W. Bush video for a school project, Ellora even says, “It’s so much easier to say mean things,” which to me feels like an apt description of how a lot of people use the internet today.

I think there has been a bit of a return to that recently with girlblogging, but some of that work is getting the same criticism that writing diaristically or about feelings has always received: it’s cringe, it’s not “real” writing, it’s self-obsessed. There was less of that type of criticism during LiveJournal’s heyday, and I don’t know if it was because my community on LiveJournal was predominantly all teenagers in their feelings, or if there was simply less history of the internet and therefore fewer preconceived notions about how you should be writing on it, or if it was just a more empathetic time online, or some combination of those things.

The form of Log Off is so brilliant: it’s through LiveJournal entries, and Ellora occasionally copies and pastes IM conversations, and refers to other LiveJournal users leaving comments on her entries, but we never see those comments, and all of the dialogue is as remembered/reported by Ellora. I love how this gives the reader such an unfiltered perspective of her experience. Did you ever toy with including other voices, like the comments on her journal entries?

Never, though I want to mention that there’s a great novel also told through LiveJournal that does include the comments, and that’s Elle Nash’s Gag Reflex (2022). That book literally looks like a LiveJournal with the Verdana font and layout, and I just have such a visceral nostalgic reaction to seeing that. With Log Off, however, there was never a draft that included comments, or that was written in the voice of any of the other characters, because I wanted the reader to be close to Ellora’s perspective and in her head from beginning to end. But as with all first-person narratives, that perspective is going to be subjective and biased.

Ellora’s able to be her true self on LiveJournal—exploring her sexuality, her abandonment by her mother at a young age, complications of relationships with family and friends, and her own anxiety about how she comes across to others. She says in an AIM chat with her online friend Slayer, “I wish the real world was more like LiveJournal.” One of my favorite lighter moments in this vein is when Ellora reveals that she’s lip-synching during choir. She’s not actually singing, but she’s performing the emotions of the songs so intensely that she wins a student-of-the-month award. Can you talk about persona and what it means for Ellora to embody different personalities?

Whether it’s true or not, I think Ellora feels she doesn’t have a persona on the internet. She feels this immediate intimacy that she lacks in her “real life” where, at least at the beginning of the novel, she keeps a lot of her feelings or needs hidden, out of fear of being rejected, abandoned, seen as uncool, or some other negative reaction.

There’s a lot of performance in the novel. Literal performance, as in the lip-synching during choir you mentioned, and how Ellora dreams of becoming a successful actress. But also the performance of showing different aspects of yourself to different people at different times. Everyone does that, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing or that it means you’re being inauthentic. If you’re socially charming at a party, that might take some effort, but it’s still just as authentically you as the you that has cried alone in your room. It only becomes a problem if there’s an aspect of yourself that you’re suppressing and it’s hurting you, or alternatively, if you make judgmental assumptions about someone else based on seeing only one aspect of them. Those two things are issues for Ellora, as well as for the other characters, and the process of working on them continues all the way up to the book’s last question/sentence and beyond.

Something I loved about the book was how Ellora has an entire support network of friends she’s never met in real life. This is true for the two of us! We met in Chelsea Hodson’s Morning Writing Club, and we see each other almost every morning, but we’ve never met in real life. Has being online always been a part of your artistic community?

Always. And that’s a great comparison—I’ve never thought about how those two things are similar. Despite the blurring of online/offline life that I mentioned earlier, there are still so many great writers I know whom I have yet to meet in real life, but who are part of mine in a significant way. I do hope we get to meet one day! I always find that moment exciting. In the Zoom era, there’s less of an unexpected element, compared to even 10 years ago when it was very likely I had no idea what an online friend’s voice sounded like until I met them. Even still, I’m always kind of starstruck. It takes my brain a few moments to process that someone who previously existed on a screen is now miraculously a 3D person moving in front of me.

We also both work in tech doing customer support. You work at Substack, which has become such a favored channel, for writers in particular, to build community. I’d love to hear about how technology, the internet, and the arts intersect (and don’t intersect?!) for you in your daily life.

I love that we have that in common. I don’t know many other writers who have a day job in tech, and specifically support, compared to the way I know a lot of writers who work in, say, academia.

One of the ways it intersects the most is that I’m picky about how technology and the internet appear in fiction. In Log Off, the Y2K era setting allows me to obliquely write about the technology and internet of today, because most readers are going to make mental comparisons of the two eras, but I think centering a novel around present-day technology and the internet would be challenging. I’ve seen a lot of things that don’t work. A technology or app invented for a novel can seem a little fake, or too conveniently created to capture the zeitgeist. I also think it’s lazy when I see start-ups in fiction entirely populated by tech bros or other tech worker stereotypes. For me, the stories or novels that succeed the most are the ones that fully portray the human aspect of interacting with technology most acutely. The humor, the heartbreak, even the banality of it. A novel like Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) or Kate Folk’s story “Big Sur” in Out There (2022).

Because of our customer support commonality, I loved the mentions in the book of when LiveJournal was down, though it made me sweaty.

I was weirdly anxious about LiveJournal’s downtime as a teen. The only entry in the novel that’s based on an actual LiveJournal entry I wrote is the one where Ellora speculates about “the downfall of LiveJournal” and frets about things that are essentially server issues, bugs, market competition, poor product decisions, and company acquisition.

Something else that makes me sweaty is AI, which, unfortunately, I do want to ask you about. What is your relationship to AI, both in regards to your tech work and in your creative life?

My publisher Lucy and I played around with ChatGPT to see if it could help us write Log Off’s back cover description copy. It couldn’t—the suggestions were pretty awful and ridiculous. I think it maybe helped me reword a phrase or two, the way using a thesaurus would.

We could probably do an entire interview about the subject of AI, so I’ll just say that, like many, I have concerns about unethical uses of AI and fears about job loss, while also being aware that some of its applications can be useful. I also think anxieties around AI are also about, or at least cannot be divorced from, anxieties around income inequality, a devaluation of the arts, climate change, and a whole lot of other issues.

You organized a book tour with your publisher (Lucy K. Shaw at Shabby Doll House) and press-mate (Oscar d’Artois), called the “Escape the Internet Tour.” What was that experience like, bringing this very online novel to people in the flesh?

Amazing. Beyond how great it was to be able to read with and hang out with people in all those cities (many of whom I first met through the internet), it was also really nice to perform this book. It lends itself to that. It’s first person, voicey, and there was even one stop where all the readers acted out a dialogue-heavy scene like a play. And it was nice to do those events with Oscar and Lucy. They both also love a performance, or putting on a bit of a show. It kind of felt like we were in a band.

I know the three of you were also working remotely through much of the tour. Do you ever get a chance to truly escape the internet? And what does that look like for you if it does happen?

Unfortunately, I don’t often escape the internet in my life—for short periods of time, yes, by going on a walk, or lately I’ve been consciously trying not to take my phone out if I’m hanging out with people, but nothing longer than that. Sometimes I do fantasize about what it would be like to take one of those self-imposed writing residencies where you turn off your phone, let your mind wander, and just see how the experience of not being on the internet changes your thinking and attention. But I also think there would be a lot of pressure on that week! To write, to make the most of it. And that’s sort of the opposite of its original intention, to simply let your mind meditate and wander.

What was it like for you to be a debut novelist during this specific time on the internet? What were some upsides and downsides of the internet landscape when launching this book?

For the most part, great. The internet helps indie novels like mine reach readers, and it’s also a big reason why indie presses are being taken more seriously by the publishing industry. I think there are both upsides and downsides to the fact that most novelists, no matter where they’re published, have to do a lot on the internet to launch a book. It can feel really satisfying to do something yourself, but it also can be its own job and you can feel a lot of worry over whether you’re not doing enough. And in the last couple years, social media has become more fractured. Someone who has a big X following can’t quite depend on that as a platform for launching a book in the same way they could four years ago with Twitter. Anyway, I’d be curious to hear your answer to this question too, as someone who was a debut novelist last year.

I’m right there with you! In many ways, the internet ecosystem felt advantageous to me as a debut author—I could find contact information for media outlets and pitch them myself; I made my own book trailer and was able to be really hands-on with my own book promo in a way that felt natural to me. But I also agree about social media being more fractured, and I sometimes wish that my book came out before Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Back to Log Off—the book ends shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the start of Ellora’s senior year of high school. Ellora has to go to her restaurant job that evening, and it feels so frivolous to her. One of her friends, an Indian boy, is harassed, discriminated against, and called a “terrorist.” She thinks of the fact that her absent mom must also be watching the same footage she is, and that it somehow connects them. The lead-up to this is Ellora navigating the 2000 election when she can’t yet vote. I was also a senior in high school then, so this through line really resonated for me. How old were you at that time? Did this book require any research for you regarding the political and pop culture events, or are they deeply ingrained in you?

I was a junior in high school during September 11, a little bit younger than Ellora. To be honest, September 11 is so ingrained in my memory that I didn’t have to do much research on that one. I did need to do some research on the 2000 election—how the media covered it and on what dates that unfolded. Same for the pop culture. Since every scene is essentially date-stamped, I didn’t want to do anything that would break the hyperreality of that. Songs could not be listed as the current music if they hadn’t come out yet. In general, though, I have a pretty good emotional memory for both the political and pop culture events, including the ways they can be paired together. Shortly before September 11, for example, there’s this entry where Ellora mentions Aaliyah’s death and lists her as the current music. Those two events are linked in my mind, as if her death always foreshadows September 11, and I know I’m not the only millennial who feels that way.

Music plays a huge role in the book, acting as the initial connective tissue for some of the friendships. Songs are denoted in almost every single journal entry, and in a pivotal event where Ellora does a school project that leads to adult concern for her. Are you able to listen to music while you write? How did you approach the music selections for each entry? [Check out Kristen’s playlist for Log Off here.]

I’m not able to listen to music while I write, but I’ll walk around listening to it to think about a piece I’m writing or editing. I approached the selections for each entry in a couple of different ways. Sometimes an artist or song was included if it was directly referenced in the entry. Ellora also often imagines her life as a movie, and some of the included songs are ones she’s imagining playing in the background, or being cut to as a scene ends. Other times, I just chose random popular songs of the era, since it’s literally supposed to be what she’s listening to at the moment of writing.

Finally, the infamous Rolling Stone interview with Fiona Apple that Ellora reenacts in a scene has been in my head for 20-plus years: “Fiona has wings … Fiona has wings …” I’m so curious how you brought this element into the story and would love to hear your memories and experience of that interview.

When that Rolling Stone profile came out, I remember reading it over and over. It was fascinating and dark in a way that appealed to me as a somewhat intense kid. But I wonder how Fiona Apple feels about it now. So much of the press about her during that time was written by men, and it often sensationalized aspects of her personality, rather than focusing on her music, or took things she said out of context, or removed the humor behind them. The acknowledgments section of Log Off is also done in LiveJournal format. It was meaningful to me to write that 2024 date and the first track from Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020) as the current music—more than 20 years later, the troubled teenagers of LiveJournal are thriving adults and Fiona Apple is more relevant than ever. And with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, everyone finally acknowledged how genius her work is, and has always been.