Fiona Apple & the Power of the Teenage Girl
with Liz Bowen, Nadia de Vries, Kristen Felicetti, Lucy K Shaw & Oscar d'Artois
What’s up Shabby Dolls!
It’s me again.
I’m writing to tell you that our new podcast episode has dropped! This time we’re discussing Fiona Apple & the Power of the Teenage Girl, both major themes in the novel of the summer, Log Off.
This episode stars:
Nadia de Vries, author of Know Thy Audience (Moist Books, 2023)
Liz Bowen, author of Compassion Fountain (Trembling Pillow Press, 2023)
, author of Log Off (Shabby Doll House, 2024)Lucy K Shaw, that’s me.
& hosted by
, author of The Island (Shabby Doll House, 2024)Yes, we invited two writers with literal PhDs to come and talk with us about Fiona Apple.
The episode is available now, wherever you get your podcasts!
Or even right here!
If you’re in Baltimore, you should come to this reading that starts in just over an hour:
And if you’re in New York, you should come to this reading on Saturday:
We started our tour last night at Lot 49 Books in Philadelphia, and it was so fun!
Needless to say, I’ll tell you more about that soon.
Okay, hope to see you somewhere!
Here’s an excerpt from the podcast if you’re the kind of person who wants to read a podcast:
Liz: Just this idea that she's messy in some way has always been so confusing to me because my, again, this is like, I'm looking at a different reality than other people, I feel, when I listen to her music or I don't know if you all have seen her play live, but I feel like when I watch her perform, what I see is just this really kind of incredible amount of control. This is a person who is like a bomb that will not go off, you know, there's so much energy and so much care and work that she has laid the groundwork for this performance with and then is summoning in the performance and this way that just feels like utterly intentional and utterly controlled. I don't know if that's just coming from some kind of shared experiential thing where it's, you know, I know how a person can totally boil over and explode when dealing with some of the things that she's invoking in her work. And the act of sort of transmuting that into what she does. I feel like I can just feel how hard that is and the labor that goes into that. And maybe that's not something other people are sort of perceiving while they watch her. But, you know, I just have always seen her as this just like a kind of otherworldly, intentional performer and artist and yeah, I don't know, my little Capricorn teen self would watch her and just, like, God, the work that goes into this, you know? Um, that's what I'm seizing on. It's like all of this feeling and all of this… like the black hole at my core or whatever, that's all there. But it's also, it's so controlled.
Oscar: You definitely can't just put the black hole on stage, right. And if anything, trying to bring the black hole on stage seems like it would require more control rather than less. And I guess maybe one reason why it might be difficult to answer the, when did you start feeling like you were being taken seriously question. Is that you always, maybe as bright people, or as people who have artistic inclinations, we kind of take ourselves seriously to begin with. You kind of talked about that as a kid. You didn't have any questions about that. And so then the sort of navy jacket of authority, you know, feels like just a drag performance or like a joke, like it's impossible to take seriously. And so when the experience itself is taken seriously, like in Fiona Apple's music, that's something that maybe inspires respect, which is something that Kristen, your book does as well.
Log Off treats its young characters with a great amount of respect, which is something that we rarely saw in relation to teen girls in literature and in film when we were growing up. Is that something that you remember feeling aware of around you, that not being taken seriously when you were younger? Or the dissonance that we were just talking about. The ability to take yourself seriously versus how you were being represented in, in culture.
Kristen: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I relate a lot to, like the quote that Liz brought up from Fiona where it's like, I hated being treated like a child even when I was a child. I remember that. I think even more so than being a teenager, when you were a little kid, people were very condescending. Adults are very condescending to you and treating you like a baby and you almost couldn't even really articulate that, but you felt it, and you felt a kind of rage about it. And so I still try to remember to treat kids, when I'm interacting them, with respect and to take them seriously and not condescend and yeah, to write teenage characters the same way. I think there's a very cheap way to sort of stereotype them and, and things like that.
I mean, just in terms of the distance from pop culture, this is kind of its own side thing. But I feel the media when I was growing up, when I was a teenager, it was so much different than my lived experience. Everything from representational stuff, it was very white, there were very few queer characters, which… it's so different now. That a very nice thing where I think teens today are seeing very different representation. But also just, you know, I think it was very rare when you'd come across a book or a movie that sort of took the the emotional aspect seriously. And so I still feel like that kind of media was still very memorable to me and still is today, things that like took, you know, the youth seriously as people and their ideas and their thoughts and like, what was in their hearts.
Oscar: Yeah, there was definitely, like, an intensity of emotion to a lot of culture, you know, in two thousands culture, even if with identity, it's true that I can't really imagine, like, much queerness being celebrated in that in that period of time. Do you think that's something that's evolving? And also do you think that the way that we see younger people and younger women is evolving, or has evolved at all? In a successful way. Your novel is almost, you know, set 25 years ago.
Kristen: Yeah. I mean, I'd be interested to hear what other folks think too. But like, I mean, even back back then, I feel like if there was a queer character, it was like one person in the group of like, straight friends and their narrative was kind of very much around, coming out or something. And like, I don't even think that was true back then, to be honest. It's certainly not true to teens experiences now.
Nadia: I feel like the influence of the internet changed a lot for sure, because I feel like before the internet you were kind of, you know, kind of confined to your direct environment and the people that you saw in school and whatnot. And now you can go online and find communities all over the world that you can relate to and talk to about things that you find important. And then it's become easier to find people you relate to. And also you can kind of confront these questions with, oh, who am I? Where do I belong? And what kind of community am I a part of? And it's also what I really like about your book, Kristen, using LiveJournal as the structure for the narrative. So I feel like it really kind of, you know embodies the value of social media and self-discovery and community in that sense.
Lucy: A big part of why I wanted to publish this book as soon as I read it was just because I felt that the representation of the experience of being a teenager was more realistic or closer to my experience of actually having been a teenager than anything else that I had read or seen, you know, in that sort of coming of age genre. Um. And that's not to say that my experience of being a teen was anything like Kristen's experience of being a teen or, you know, the narrator of the books, because we're completely different people growing up in different countries. But I just felt like it was more nuanced than I was used to seeing. And also the story is told from the point of view of probably somebody who in, like, a teen movie that would have come out when we were teenagers, wouldn't have been the main character, you know that Ellora, the narrator of the book is the protagonist is kind of like, uh, it just feels revelatory to me because it's so much easier for me to relate to her and where she's coming from, than the popular guy in the movie or, you know, like, literally when we were growing up, when we watched teen movies, it was like every single one had a girl and she wears glasses, and then she takes them off and it turns out she's actually pretty, you know that was how we were represented. That's how girls were represented in teen stories. And nobody relates to that. Right. That's just not real at all.