Danielle Chelosky is a writer from New York. She is the author of Romantic Abjection, Female Loneliness Epidemic, and other books; the curator and host of the literary reading series Weird Fucks, which has featured literary legends like Darcey Steinke and Lisa Carver; and the 2022 recipient of the Lori Hertzberg Prize for Creativity at Sarah Lawrence College, where she obtained her BA. She is also a staff writer/trusted music critic at Stereogum and has journalism in The Fader, NPR, and Dazed. She loves 2hollis and Yellow American Spirits.
Right off the bat, I’m really curious about your internet persona, men’s reactions to you on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, etc., and how these reactions affect or fit into your writing. For those who don’t know, can you talk about your online male haters/fans? How does this energy serve you? Is it like Andy Warhol’s quote, “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches”? Or something else?
Well, I let incels hating me on 4chan inspire my new novella a bit. I didn’t want it to seep into my writing because I thought it would sort of be like letting them win. I wanted to believe that they were not worthy of inspiring me. But a lot of my writing is about degradation and insecurity, so it sort of naturally ended up in the novella.
I was being posted on 4chan every day and they were belittling my writing, complaining about my thirst traps, etc. It was an interesting glimpse into the incel psyche and my reaction to being the subject of their vitriol. I don’t really dissect it in the novella; it just sits there and adds to the atmosphere of that time in my life, which was last winter, around November of 2025 to February of 2026. I hope it doesn’t come across as self-victimizing. What they were saying wasn’t really the worst element of it; it was my compulsive urge to check it that was really bad. I used to get really upset about people hating me or being mean to me but not so much anymore. 2hollis, my favorite musician, gets a lot of hate online, meanwhile he’s a perfect amazing visionary genius in my eyes. So, I remind myself of that for perspective.
How do your online and IRL appearance (“thirst traps”), public persona, and private, sexual selfhood serve the writing, and the other way around? Does your public persona help you meet people? Do you write about your friends, people you meet, real lovers?
I’ve always liked expressing myself through the internet, especially through internet-specific visual aesthetics. Like, the MacBook Photo Booth feature makes me feel nostalgic. I guess it’s sort of trying to match the messy intimacy of my writing. I don’t really think of it as a persona. But I feel like I reach the closest thing to a “public persona” when I host my literary reading series Weird Fucks, and I’ve made so many friends through doing those events.
I write about real people most of the time, though Baby Bruise was entirely fictional and Female Loneliness Epidemic was mostly fictional. But I write about my life frequently and compulsively, the same way I smoke cigs or check my phone, it just happens. It’s a sort of documenting, I guess. I would call it Knausgaard-inspired but I started reading him a long time after I started doing it. But I love him and love his autobiographical work. Same with Annie Ernaux.
When I read Pregaming Grief, I was furious for a couple of days. I thought it was terrible, a waste of my time, too raw, uninteresting. Then suddenly, it all turned around on me. It hit me, I realized it was genius. It provoked so much emotion in me it’s like I rode a big wave.
I delved into my fury and pondered why I felt it. It turned out reading about a young woman exploring the world through sex and relationships unapologetically made me uncomfortable. And I wondered why. It’s kind of fresh, and is something that is usually written in a male perspective. An open, blunt, girl talking about her sex life and emotions without any resolution, climax or huge transformation isn’t as common. I think that makes it all the more necessary. What is it you hope your audience will experience? And why is this the subject of your choice? Do you intend to shock?
No, I didn’t expect to shock people and am surprised when they have that reaction. I didn’t think Pregaming Grief was inflammatory; women have been writing about sex and drinking and self-destruction for a long time, I didn’t think it would be scandalizing if I did.
I’ve never really understood taboos. I thought we were all kind of desensitized and numb to everything now. It was my subject of choice because it was just what was going on at the time and I felt the inexplicable need to write my way through it.
How did art school shape you as a writer, if at all? What were your very first pieces like? Did you have other practices like visual art while at Sarah Lawrence? How did the college days become an autofiction practice?
I took as many writing classes as humanly possible. One professor introduced me to Chelsea Hodson, and another introduced me to Tao Lin, and that helped me get into the Alt Lit scene, and now I’ve become acquainted with and published by Chelsea and Tao, so I have to thank Sarah Lawrence College for pointing me in their direction. I was really inspired by the way Chelsea wrote about her life in Tonight I’m Someone Else and probably desperately tried to imitate that for a while. I took a painting class and a printmaking class and was the worst student in both.
You’re incredibly prolific. At 25, you have published three books, with a fourth one on the way. How? Why? Is there a rush? How do you do it? Can you talk about your process? From what I know you live with your mother on Long Island, read and write all day, go for long walks and collect seashells, then come party in the city for a reading once in a while.
As a Zoomer, there’s always a rush. I always feel like I’m going to die/the world is going to end so I want to do as much as I can. It’s also a sort of constant attempt to fill the void, like drinking is. It helps that I’m underemployed. I’m scared of boredom. Boredom makes me extremely depressed. So, occupying myself with projects saves me. I don’t have a specific routine or regimen for writing; I just do it whenever inspiration strikes, and usually I have a lot, for some reason.
Talk about your forthcoming book, Romantic Abjection. What’s it about? What makes it special, relevant, and different from your previous books?
Romantic Abjection is about being 25 and about being 15. It’s about how all heartbreak is a repeat of the first heartbreak you ever experienced. It’s better than my other books, I think, because it has these two different perspectives. For the perspective that’s 25, I was really inspired by Jean Rhys’ style, of the way she lets her protagonist lead the reader through the streets of Paris, following a woman as she gets drunk at bars, cries, smokes cigarettes, has crisis after crisis. It’s very sleek; her sentences are perfect. I was inspired by that.
For the perspective that’s 15, I had just read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and was enamored with the juvenile tone and tried for something similar — just a kind of childish outpouring that was very fun to write — except instead of it being about a neurotic, feverishly horny Jewish boy, it’s about being a Lana Del Rey-obsessed, Catholic-raised girl on Tumblr.
What’s something that’s true about you that most people wouldn’t know?
I’m the best driver in the world.
Be the first to comment