by Cori Fulcher

Not too long ago, I talked with a friend about men who could write teenage girls. I had mentioned Jeffery Eugenides and could not for the life of me think of any others. I listed all the teenage girls of literature I loved dearly and then remember one by one they were written by women. We discussed and immediately dismissed John Green– I personally find his characters repetitive and one-dimensional, but if anyone out there finds him to be an authentic peddler of the teen girl experience I’m completely supportive of you. Then suddenly and rather off-handedly I said “well, there’s always B.J. Novak and Keo Novak”.

It wasn’t that I mentioned those two names late in the conversation because I was desperate and had resigned myself to merely tossing out something I didn’t consider an outright lie. It was just that I had a hard time remembering Keo Novak was a work of fiction.

According to Keo’s twitter, she is the youngest of the Novak siblings, most famously the actor and writer B.J. Novak. She is 16. Her twitter profile image is often a picture of the actress Kiernan Shipka lighting a cigarette. I believe it is a still from Mad Men, but I don’t know for certain (I’ve tried to watch Mad Men but all of the cigarette smoke makes me nauseous). It looks in many ways like my twitter picture, which is of me. I am not looking into the camera. My hair is held back by sunglasses, heart sunglasses. I have a pixie cut but the way my hair is held back makes it look longer. Like the other picture, I look bored and melancholic. The pictures are trying to look an age, but it’s unclear what age that is. The grown-up aspects–the cigarette, the sunglasses–look calculated, but in a naive way, like dress-up, and perhaps make the subjects of the photographs look younger.

Keo Novak has been 16 for three years. B.J. Novak has more or less admitted she isn’t a real person, although tactfully at one point saying “she’s the sister I always wanted to have, in a way,” which  I find endearing. There are no photographs of her on the internet, but there is a small, insistent part of me that thinks I am operating under some sort of wild misunderstanding and SPARK will have to issue a retraction immediately. Her voice is something I maybe a little vainly recognize myself in, suburban and obsessive and self-conscious. I’ve read a lot of stories about teenage girls, many of them written by adult men, but this feels completely authentic to me–or at the very least, a voice worried about and conscious of its inauthenticity, which feels true(r?) to my experience. The idea of male authorship conjures up images of heavy books and misreadings of Lolita. All the teenage girls are having affairs with the men they babysit for; all of them are lovestruck or promiscuous or forced into prostitution. That isn’t to say I can’t enjoy such stories, but I’m wary of them.

But Keo and I exist simultaneously on the Internet. She isn’t a character in a book whose internal monologue I’m somehow privy to, and she isn’t warped or obscured by other characters. On Twitter, she seems to be figuring out a persona, constantly adjusting what she wants to sound like and come across as. Her life isn’t momentous and doesn’t appear to follow any typical coming-of-age story, even if she wants it to. Keo Novak likes fashion. She’s fascinated by modern celebrity. She has anxiety about successful young people. She’s constantly trying to get access to HBOGO. Most of the time it’s hard to tell if she’s speaking from genuine fascination or cynical detachment. That’s me, essentially-at least that’s a version of me right now, I don’t know if it’s my essence.  I am going to grow up and Keo isn’t, or at least she hasn’t yet. It isn’t my decision and I wouldn’t want it to be.