“Hello, people of the internet. Let it be known that today, 9/5/Y2K, my legal guardian Brian finally joined the modern world and connected our computer to the great World Wide Web.”
This is how readers meet Ellora Gao, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Kristen Felicetti’s debut novel, Log Off (Shabby Doll House, 2024). Told in a series of frank but tender online diary entries, Ellora examines her abandonment by her mother, her life with her alcoholic guardian (her mom’s ex), and her growing awareness of her own queerness and identity as Chinese American. As Ellora navigates the turbulent waters of teenage friendships and comes into her own voice, she provides scathing commentary on life in a majority-white Western New York suburb at the turn of the millennium.
Kristen Felicetti is the founding editor-in-chief of The Bushwick Review, a print literary journal that was founded in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A dedicated literary community builder, Felicetti has organized countless literary events and works tirelessly to elevate the voices of other writers in her interviews and profiles. Her writing spans short fiction, travel writing, and memoir, and Log Off is her first book.
Over video chat, we discussed what inspired her to write a novel-length work, why she structured the book as a series of online diary entries, how she developed Ellora’s singular voice, and her decision to include the generation-defining events of the election of George W. Bush and 9/11 in Log Off. Felicetti talks about channeling her teenage memories and favorite music into her writing, as well as giving Western New York a place in literature.
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The Rumpus: How did you get the inspiration to write Log Off? Did you start with the structure? Did you start with the characters? Did it just come to you? I’m so curious how it evolved.
Kristen Felicetti: For a long time, I’d had some elements of the book. For example, I’d always had a teenage girl protagonist, and her name was Ellora, though she wasn’t quite the same character that she is in the book now. I had vague ideas of some of the other characters, like that she had an overachieving group of friends. The element that her mom had abandoned her as a child and she’s raised by her mom’s ex-boyfriend was always there.
At first, I wasn’t writing the book all that seriously. I was just like, “Oh, I’m just having fun.” But then, around 2018, I really started, and the defining elements of the book came into focus: I decided to have it take place against the backdrop of the early internet and in LiveJournal format. That’s also when the voice that Ellora has, came into being, and that decision made all of the other elements come into place.
If I’d written this book when I was a teen, it would have been a lot more melodramatic in tone. Writing it as an adult, I was able to give the characters, especially Ellora, this Nineties sarcasm, which makes the tone lighter when heavy things happen.
Rumpus: How did you decide to have a more minimalist writing style rather than lean all the way into the drama?
Felicetti: I wanted to capture the sense that when you’re a teenager, things can sort of weirdly all have the same weight. It can be like, “Oh, my friend has a serious eating disorder,” or, “My guardian is an alcoholic,” but then, be like, “Well, what am I going to have for lunch today?” or “This teacher really pissed me off.” At that age, it feels like most everything is equally serious, and this book aims to convey that spirit.
Rumpus: Log Off is really driven by the voice of the main character, Ellora Gao. How did you home in on her voice?
Felicetti: I like novels that are voicey, but I did some re-reading of my favorite coming-of-age novels that are really first-person driven to see what was going on in that realm: The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, of course, but also Cruddy by Lynda Barry, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews.
I also really like language and the way people speak. Everything in the book is in the voice of Ellora’s narration. At the beginning of the book, she’s isolated. She doesn’t have a lot of friends and spends a lot of time at home reading and watching movies. Her speech is off-kilter from that, as she’ll just use phrases that are drawn from the media she’s consuming. But then, a lot of the book is classic teenage stuff, and it isn’t that hard for me to get into that teenaged mindset or ramp up that voice a bit.
Rumpus: Log Off is told exclusively through Ellora’s LiveJournal entries. How did that structure impact your approach to the book?
Felicetti: The format really drives the book. Because it’s a diary, you never leave Ellora’s head. I think that builds a lot of trust with the reader. And you do feel you’re reading somebody’s diary. Some entries are really long, as if you’re reading a chapter in a book, but some can be really short or just jokes or use formats that existed on LiveJournal, like the surveys. That format gives the book a lot of momentum, but it also creates a limitation. I thought that was really interesting to play with.
When I was writing the entries, I was always tied to the date. Even from a copyediting perspective, I had to make sure everything was correct. Every single entry is Ellora’s writing and you know that everything just happened in the near past tense, and that continues through nearly the whole book. So, you move linearly as a reader. There’s never any jumping in time.
Rumpus: Log Off tackles both the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and September 11, 2001, in a way that feels very organic and not pedantic. Why did you decide to incorporate these events into the narrative, and how did you approach writing about them?
Felicetti: Once you’re in the LiveJournal days, the early internet format, you have less than ten years that you can work with. As a millennial, 9/11 was such a definitive time. It felt like everything before and everything after was a different world. I think that’s part of the book to show this sort of optimism going into the new millennium before 9/11 was not necessarily genuine; it was just hiding problems below the surface. At the time, it felt like once 9/11 happened that increasingly all the problems and shit we’re in now just continued to grow. As a reader, you know there’s never any relief from them after that.
I knew that the book would take place around the span of a year, so I thought, “What was something else definitive that happened during that time? Well, the Bush-Gore election.” Everything in the book that’s historical is used to talk about today. A lot of people who have read the book have been like, “Oh, bleak, we’re still in the same situations.” I was able to use those moments to talk about today as well as really depict the specific time period.
I didn’t need to do much research to remember what it was like being a suburban kid who was never anywhere near New York City during 9/11. I emotionally remember everything about that day; that it was either just intense or banal and ridiculous.
Rumpus: It’s really interesting how you used the election and 9/11 to reflect the characters’ growing political consciousness and identity as tied to that consciousness.
Shifting a little bit, I’m interested in your relationship with technology. Log Off captures the specific technology of that time period so well, but also serves as a cautionary tale, as the title suggests. Do you have some nostalgia for the LiveJournal days? And how did your perspective of knowing what happened after, with the advent of social media, inform this book?
Felicetti: It was all of those things. I think part of the reason that I was writing this book was because it felt like a foreign era. It was a totally different time when the internet was weird and fun. I think writing about current technology in a present-day setting would be difficult. Also, it’s just not that fun. So, I get a cheat code where there’s an entertaining nostalgia aspect where some people that were online at that time will laugh and remember. But also, I think as a reader, you can make the mental connection between the internet then and now and how much things have changed.
Ellora gains somewhat of a following on LiveJournal, and while I think that it boosts her confidence when she realizes that people appreciate her work, she’s never doing it for what we call followers now. She’s aware she’s writing for an audience and that you write differently for them, but she’s not strategically creating a certain type of content to get followers. Even in the beginning, she believes that nobody’s even going to really read her LiveJournal, but she feels she needs to do it to express herself and thinks the platform is cool.
Now, I think social media is so much about what other people think and appearing in certain ways. Especially when I started the book, in the late 2010s, it was peak Instagram culture, but I think it’s died down a bit. I feel like people are craving more authenticity, but it’s not quite the same, because what does authenticity even mean? I don’t think you can do that in the same way that you could twenty years ago because you have the whole history of the internet in your brain.
The tensions with technology begin to surface toward the end of the novel. There are some elements that frustrate us about the internet now that are starting to form. For example, at the end, someone in Ellora’s LiveJournal community posts a piece of art that people take issue with and, for the first time in the novel, a “discourse” takes place. Ellora stops writing on LiveJournal because she doesn’t like the discourse, and more people are joining, and her worst fear is that people at school find her journal. She doesn’t want any fame for her writing in her circle.
Rumpus: Speaking of Ellora’s friends, let’s talk about the setting of the book: a small suburb of a small city in Western New York. You include some precise details to locate it very specifically, but there’s a very shared suburban ennui that you capture that many teenagers experience. How did you choose the setting, and how did you avoid just this flat kind of “this town sucks, I’m going to leave” that many teens experience?
Felicetti: The book takes place in a suburb called Parkview outside of a city that is never named—but is Rochester, New York—and is based on the suburb that I grew up in outside of Rochester. In some ways, I didn’t want to do that because it’s kind of embarrassing to write a place that is exactly your hometown. But the reason I wanted to is because I haven’t really seen Western or Central New York represented that much in movies or fiction. So, it was an opportunity to really go in on that because where I grew up is very classic American suburbia. Some of my friends who’ve seen it who grew up in other places are like “Wow, it looks like the movies.” But there are some aspects to it that are super unique to it, like the fictionalized Wegmans and other details that people from the area will pick up on, even certain music references.
In the book, I’m depicting upper middle-class Rochester. And I think many people believe that New York State is very liberal, but that’s not true. In Log Off,the area is conveyed much more as a conservative suburb that’s very white, and I wanted to capture that down to the last detail. In the coming-of-age genre, there is that kind of feeling of, “I want to get out of my town,” and part of the reason Ellora goes online is that she wants to escape some of the limitations of her town. But I think that there’s also a trope in movies from the time, like American Beauty, especially around Y2K, of suburban suburbia being this hellscape of conformity. So, the setting is a little bit of a nod to that, but also more empathetic. Like, if I remember something with this much detail, there is still some love and affection there. It’s a complicated relationship, but when you describe it so intensely, you can’t hate it.
Rumpus: You mentioned musical references, and music is such a strong element in Log Off. Ellora chooses a song to go with her LiveJournal entries, and sometimes she writes about the song or why she picked it. I’m curious, how did you choose the music that you would pair with entries? Did you write the entries first and then decide the songs? Did you make a playlist?
Felicetti: I definitely wanted to incorporate some of my favorite artists of the era, like Fiona Apple, Radiohead, Elliot Smith, and Tori Amos, and I made deliberate choices to align with what was current in my suburb at the time. Ben Folds Five is the most white suburban music I could think of, and a lot of people from the real Parkview did like him, so I opened the book with a Ben Folds Five song. Some of the choices are more random because it’s supposed to be like Ellora’s listening to that track while she’s writing the entry, but other times I think she sees her life a little bit like a movie, so she’s picking a song that fits the tone of what she’s writing about. If the book were a movie and the scene cut away, the track listed is the one that would be playing in that scene.
Rumpus: I want to shift to talk a bit more about where this book fits in your growth as a writer. You published The Bushwick Review for a decade, which highlighted more experimental work. Log Off is your first novel. Have you always been a fiction writer and aspired to write a novel?
Felicetti: I always predominantly wrote fiction, but I usually wrote shorter pieces. They were often first person, and they were almost like weird, experimental stand-up and often meant to be read aloud. I think readers can see the trajectory of that writing, especially in some of the early entries in Log Off. This was my first serious novel attempt, and I think making the book was a really fulfilling learning experience for me, not just doing those stand-alone voicey pieces but actually building storylines and bringing them together and having them resolve in a really satisfying way.
My experience with putting together The Bushwick Review really helped in terms of being on a small press. It enabled me to put all the elements that go into a book together, like working with a designer I liked and finding cover art.
As for the literary community aspect of it, I’ve always been involved and supportive of other writers, but let me tell you, after this experience I’ve become even more so. I’ve been so appreciative of the way that everybody is showing up. It also makes me realize how much saying something to a writer matters. When I’ve liked something before, I’ve just tapped a “like” or something on Instagram and thought, “Oh, if I do anything more, that might be bothering them.” And you know, from this side, now I see that no, writers definitely do want any sort of affirmations that they can hear. You want to feel you have people in your corner because that feels very welcoming and encouraging through this whole nerve-wracking process.
Rumpus: Is there any wisdom you want to impart to writers who are approaching the publication of their first book?
Felicetti: Something that I had to come to terms with is that you can’t do everything, especially if you have other things going on in your life. There’s always something that you feel that you’re not doing enough of in terms of promotion or sending emails, and it’s probably true, but there’s no cap on that. So, you just have to let things go. And on the flip side, sometimes you might think, “Oh, I missed the opportunity,” but it could come back around at another time. And you actually didn’t need to stress out about it as much. You don’t need to do X thing at Y time for something to happen.
Rumpus: What’s next? Are you fired up and ready to write another novel?
Felicetti: I do have two ideas for the next novel. I think that I’m gonna try both and see which one wins out. One is a multi–point-of-view family novel, so there are different perspectives, and all the characters are famous in some way.
And then the other idea, since I just wrote a book with a really young narrator, this narrator is going to be very old. I think that it was easy for me to remember being a teenager and going back to that place, so I think it’ll be a different type of challenge to get into the mindset of a phase of life that I haven’t experienced yet.
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Author photograph courtesy of Kristen Felicetti
