Literati yet to meet Brittany Menjivar can now do so through her hardcopy publishing debut, a slender prose/poetry collection titled parasocialite. As a cheeky culture correspondent (a Salvadorian born in the DMV) and founder of Car Crash Collective (a late-night lit monthly hosted at Footsie’s Bar in LA’s Cypress Park), Menjivar does not shy from dropping names.

Perhaps she intends no true auto-biographizing, though to counter, Menjivar was subject to a car accident that led to cosmetic surgery, informing her lit collective’s “Car Crash” moniker. In “HOLLYWOOD MOMENTS,” her persona has “made it among people who don’t need to make it.” Being a Yale alum, this could be an adornment of fact. Then in “CATBOY EDIT,” a manipulative prep school narrator works with a classmate to access this student’s brother’s bedroom. Albeit speculative, the narrative linearity suggests a symbolic truth in line with the works of Chris Kraus.

At times, parasocialite achieves broader awareness. In particular, “ANIMAL ABUSE” juxtaposes a girl’s inner quest to attain PETA-level advertorial beauty standards while facing the temptation to watch the 2014 David Haines’ ISIS beheading video. As the collection’s gut-punching climax, Menjivar’s persona turns the experience of witnessing death into a reuniting with a state of rarefied, postnatal innocence. With its many attributions to a higher power, perhaps the work’s thesis is to capture the essence of religious transcendence vis-à-vis colloquial language.

Complementing this dialogue with a creator, “NEVER FORGET” yields a startling syllogism: acceptance of a circumstance may allow one to “exist forever as a symbol” with “a symbol [being] the best shortcut to grace.” Whether connoting wisdom or warning, such formidable truths seem inevitable for a generation born to eternal global cataclysm. And Menjivar seems fit for this task of semantic divination.

Though I wished Menjivar explored more magical realism. Short-lived were the line-by-line joys of “NEVER FORGET.” Here, a 9/11 childbirth in a Lower East Side McDonald’s culminates in miraculous insight. And while “ELEPHANT CROSSING” did veer toward absurdism, it maintained facial symbolism in its satire of American gun violence.

“ELEPHANT CROSSING” highlights Menjivar’s MFA-hewed prosody, with its teen boy putting down an escaped spotted leopard that “whimpered, stumbled back” before “bullets rained down” and the feline “relented” until he “lay in a pool of blood.” “INTERNALIZATION” captures Sylvia Plath’s decorative psychological intricacies when while “heaven could drop in my lap” as “old men” face the “closeness to death” . . . “I sleep with my mouth cracked / To let in the spiders / They weave the most gorgeous / Webs in my throat.”

At its conceptual zenith, “A TRICK FOR SOPHIE” features a young girl compelled to hide her written philosophy from an approaching man, reasoning that Evil “requires such attention” and that for the “broken psyche . . . powerlessness” might serve as an “act of devotion.” Hannah Arendt herself should approve.

Cycling between the mundane and the sublime, Menjivar’s small prayers probe the fantastical to access the reality of a Western woman’s becoming. Tabloid superficiality aside, ample substance awaits discerning eyes.

parasocialite
Brittany Menjivar
Dream Boy Book Club
2024