True Confessions Of A Hot Girl: The Definitive Review
by Cat G
In her dazzling debut publication, Harper Koch-Heade courageously asks the question “what would happen if Chris Kraus sustained a traumatic brain injury and just kept writing?” Hot Girl Manifesto is not just a stunning work of autotheory, but a revelatory examination of just how hard the life of a twenty-three-year-old Brooklyn transplant and Substack poetess can be. The essays in this collection explore a diverse array of topics, touching on everything from that one thing that happened on Twitter eighteen months ago to that one thing that happened on
TikTok sixteen months ago. While much of her writing is concerned with social media, Koch-Heade also invokes critical theory and continental philosophy as lenses via which to analyze pop-cultural phenomena. “The Phenomenology of Dimes Square” takes a dialectical approach to understanding the Red Scare subreddit, while “Approaching Flabjection” uses concepts developed by Julia Kristeva in “Powers of Horror” to explain why anorexia is low-key chicer than bulimia. “The Jouissance of Zyns” was undoubtedly my favorite essay in the book, and I think the decision to conduct a Lacanian reading of the popular nicotine pouch’s packaging was nothing short of brilliant.
Whether she’s calling Ghislaine Maxwell a style icon or explaining why using gay as an insult is actually sort of subversive and post-modern, Koch-Heade is not afraid to GO THERE. The Bushwick based essayist has a reputation for being a bit of a provocateur; just two months ago she got into hot water online after referring to fellow writer Jia Tolentino as a “skinny-fat BPD hoe” in a since deleted tweet. In spite of this, Koch-Heade insists she’s more of an impish troll than a political dissident. When asked about her recent controversies in an interview with Compact magazine, she explained that “ever since becoming Catholic two months ago” she has “no desire to engage with narcissistic woke-scolds online,” shortly before posting a story on Instagram calling Andrea Long Chu a “nasty pervert with a full-scale 70 IQ.” When asked about the secret to her success, Koch-Heade clarified that the money she used to promote her collection of essays came not from her father who works at BlackRock, but rather from queer philanthropist Peter Thiel.
Like many other voices of a generation, Koch-Heade has proved to be a largely divisive figure in the literary community. Plenty of people have levied bad fait critiques against her, arguing that she is “an astonishingly bad writer” whose essays are “ultimately just vapid long-form subtweets with a pseudo-intellectual sheen written in prose so turgid one can only imagine she’s taking 80mg of Adderall a day.” Nevertheless, Koch-Heade has taken to shutting down her haters by pointing out that her BMI is much lower than theirs, proving once again that you just can’t keep a Hot Girl down.
