It's Always High School

The writer Elizabeth Ellen earned my admiration in October of 2022 when, as the Deputy Editor of literary journal Hobart Pulp, she defied the then-reigning orthodoxy of cancellations and speech-policing and published an interview containing taboo, forbidden, but humorous and obviously and widely true statements. And then instead of backtracking and issuing an apology, as was the norm, she stood up to the cancel mobs, weathered her staff quitting, and kept on publishing. It’s a well-known story at this point and it’s also already a little bit difficult to remember how unusual Ellen was in the lit-mag context of 2022, when to publicly support her would have posed a threat to a person’s livelihood in books or media. Her latest novel, American Thighs, published in January 2025, explicitly riffs on her unique, punk rock, insider-outsider status through its humorous invocation of Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho—Ellen circulated an original cover design playing off Ellis’s cover—while also offering its own countercultural diagnosis of America.