and all of it seems like diamonds you want to eat, and yet, the characters themselves seem kind of airless, like macarons or cotton candy. In E!, the women have been so commodified you can’t even reach their hunger.

AR: You once said that The Ravenous Audience was for teenage girls. What was it like for you to be a teenage girl?

KD: Well, I said that in an interview a long time ago and I don’t think it’s untrue, but it’s also a book for anybody. When I was a teenage girl I went through a really rough time. I was in Christian school, I felt really lost, and like I couldn’t be myself, and like I didn’t know who my self was. At the time, my mother gave me The Bell Jar. That book really helped me, to realize that someone else felt the way I did was incredibly powerful. I thought of The Ravenous Audience as existing in that way — it was my way of working through my own adolescence and coming of age, reckoning with all these myths and stories I’d heard that were supposed to be helpful but were actually really complicated. So in some sense it’s an offering to teenage girls and also the teenage girl I was.

AR: How’d you become aware of the teen girl Tumblr aesthetic?

KD: Years ago, someone told me to go on Tumblr and I don’t remember who it was. I was completely amazed. I just thought, I wish I’d had this as a teenager. I’d had AOL chat rooms and instant messenger but no Tumblr. I felt a lot of isolation as a teen and my alternative culture came from music and underground clubs.

I was a witness of the phenomenon for a really long time before creating any work about it, seeing it as a manifestation of girl culture, learning the lingo. I’ve been interested in the way it has