Feature originally published in Heroine 22

Eileen Kelly has experienced the internet at its most accepting, and its most abusive – and she wants to lay it all bare. In her teenage years, Kelly was known as a new wave NYC It-Girl, recognised as much for her sex-positive social media presence as her viral blog Killer And A Sweet Thang, which scratched at ‘taboo’ topics and opened them up for discussion. Alongside an encouraging community came the inevitable dark side of a life shared on screen, and in 2014 Kelly sought psychiatric treatment at McLean Hospital.

This experience was as healing as it was empowering, leading Kelly to create her highly-acclaimed podcast, Going Mental, an open platform where she can freely disseminate and destigmatise what she’d learned in treatment, inviting guests from diverse fields to unpack their experiences and share expertise. These have included Amanda Knox, Bella Thorne and Madison Beer, alongside Dr. Igor Galynker, Director of the Suicide Research Laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital, and founder of GenZ Girl Gang and reproductive rights activist Deja Foxx.

Kelly’s story wouldn’t look out of place in the writing of award-winning author Ottessa Moshfegh, whose work explores themes of self-identity, addiction, loss and mental health by taking subversive swipes at society’s values and stigmas (not least in her aptly titled 2015 novel, Eileen).

[Interview conducted prior to the Los Angeles wildfires]

Ottessa Moshfegh: You’ve just moved to LA?
Eileen Kelly: Yeah, about a month ago now.

OM: What prompted the move?
EK: I just wanted a change. [I’d] been in New York for over ten years and I’m approaching 30 and wanted a different pace of life. I love New York, I love the energy and it was an integral part of shaping who I am, but I was starting to feel a bit overstimulated there. I wanted a little more solitude, which I’ve been able to find in LA.

OM: LA is really good for solitude.
EK: Are you in LA?

OM: Not right now. I usually live in Pasadena but I’m doing stuff to my house and can’t be there, so I’m staying in a place right outside of Palm Springs. I’ve been here since the beginning of the summer.
EK: I actually live close by in Los Feliz and I’m always in historic town Pasadena – that’s my favourite place.

OM: I like it too. What do you like about it?
EK: I grew up in Seattle, I’m not from New York originally, and there’s something very small town about Pasadena’s downtown area that’s very nostalgic for me. I feel like I’m still acclimating to living here and in my moments of discomfort I will go to Old Pasadena and grab a coffee.

OM: I think I’d been to Pasadena only once before I went to see the house that I live in. I’d been to Vroman’s Bookstore, which is just down Colorado Boulevard. It was the last place I thought I would ever wind up. When I moved to LA… I always get the year wrong, I think it was 2011. The teens are a decade that I think have not been properly scrutinised. Like, what the hell was happening? [laughs] My impression was like, “Oh, this [is a] sort of culturally void era,” but of course that’s not what it was, we just needed to get further away to really look at it. First I moved into a rented room in Hancock Park, I’d somehow been connected with this woman who was a senior gossip columnist who’d been there from the beginning of gossip columns, and she had this really incredible mid-century house.
EK: And you were living with her?

OM: I was renting a room, she had a couple of tenants. Then I randomly ran into this girl that I sort of knew in college. She told me her roommates were leaving, so I ended up moving in with her and this guy whose name I never learned. I think he was a pizza delivery boy, all he did was play video games and chain smoke in his room. It was such a bad apartment, but it was in Angelino Heights.
EK: Do you think it was formative of your experience in LA or your work at that time?

OM: It was very important because, you know when you’re new somewhere… I wandered around a lot and tried to get to know the city, which involved driving and going to coffee shops. At that time I was also trying to find a community of like-minded people, in lifestyle and writing. The really important place that I found was just down the street on Sunset – this bookstore café called Stories. Have you been there?
EK: No, I haven’t.

OM: I wrote a lot in their backyard and smoked a lot of cigarettes back there. I don’t think you’re allowed to anymore. I just absorbed the vibe and tried to understand what the hell was going on.
EK: You grew up in the Boston area, right?

“I started my podcast after I had spent half a year in a psychiatric unit, and I was at a place where I had yet to accept what I had just gone through.”

OM: I grew up in Boston and then lived in New York, like you I was there for ten years, then I left to go to Grad school in Rhode Island. We’d just had one of our worst winters and it was very similar to the decision you made.
EK: Like, “I need to do something. I need to live somewhere where my life will be really different.” I’ll have moments where I ask, “Did I make the right decision? [laughs] Do I regret my decision?” But I’m leaning into the change and the unknown.

OM: I feel like you move to New York and you can have a life in like 75 minutes, you can have twenty new friends and all these experiences. It sort of creates this story for you. But Los Angeles is an investment, and if you are loyal to it, it will start getting deeper and richer. For me, it was a slow process really connecting to LA and Southern California in general. It still feels weird that I live here.
EK: Have you found it a better environment for writing than living in New York or the East Coast?

OM: I don’t think I could be a writer in New York City or Brooklyn. Actually, I don’t even know if I could afford to live in Brooklyn anymore. I could be a writer anywhere as long as I have a quiet enough room, but New York isn’t a normal place, it gets to you, even if you’re, I don’t know, seven feet underground. [It’s] intense.
EK: It is intense. I sometimes miss the aliveness that I felt there, but like I said, I’m trying to lean into this shift, trying to find a new routine, meet new people, new friends, reconnect with old friends… learn how to pronounce Sepulveda [Boulevard]. [both laugh]

OM: Yeah, when I moved here I had the kind of GPS you plugged into your cigarette lighter and it mispronounced the names of every street: [Robotic voice] ‘Sepul-veda.’
EK: [laughs] Exactly.

OM: How do you think living in LA is going to shift what you’re doing creatively?
EK: I felt so alive and excited in New York but almost a bit distracted, so I’m excited to spend more time alone and have a better relationship with nature – as corny as that sounds. To sit with myself and [think] “OK, what are the next steps I want in my life?” So much of my work has been talking about my own experiences, whether that’s in a podcast or blogging, and so just being open and vulnerable about the unknown and the fears I have… it’s a scary time but it’s also an exciting time.

OM: Do you feel like you can be completely honest in your work about what you’re really afraid of… You mentioned fears, I’m not trying to put words into your mouth.
EK: I have fears all the time, insecurities and doubts. I’m entering my 30s, and during my 20s I felt like I had it all figured out. But then you take a couple of steps forward and you’re like, wait, maybe I don’t have it figured out. That’s also just part of maturing, accepting that there’s a lot I don’t know and having a lot of unanswered questions. It’s exciting but at the same time terrifying. I have been a little bit frozen during this move.

OM: Moving is incredibly daunting, jarring and weird. But it is really exciting. I think your nervous system goes through some horrible stressful cycle. When it’s over, the relief isn’t exactly comfort. It’s not like you wake up and you’re like, “Oh, my new place,” and everything falls into order.
EK: I look at my life in sections: I grew up in Seattle, then I moved to New York when I was seventeen. I lived there for ten years. I went through relationships. I struggled very heavily with mental illness and mental health. It’s all led me to this place today, and it’s also inspired my work in different ways. So I’m like, bring it on. I know that whatever downs I feel ultimately inspire the next steps I want to take.

“People rarely talk about emotions, it’s not something that I feel our society or culture rewards.”

OM: How do you see the difference in attitudes around mental health and wellness? I think wellness in New York is very different from wellness in LA – as an item of vocabulary, the associations are different.
EK: Wellness in LA is very much a lifestyle that’s almost something to be bought and sold, which feels different to New York. You’re very conscious of body image here, which isn’t necessarily what I would call mentally healthy.

OM: No. [laughs]
EK: Each city comes with its own set of issues.

OM: I totally agree. Being alone was uncomfortable when I lived in New York and it was very easy to immediately shift out of that discomfort. I think LA can be a very isolating place, and certainly during the pandemic, if I hadn’t been living with my husband I don’t know how I could have possibly survived that. Tell me about your work, how many other people does it involve?
EK: It depends. I’m usually working on several projects at once. I produced a short film this year about mental health, about a parent of a school shooter [His Mother, directed by Maia Scalia], I have my podcast and I used to write a blog. I used to do a lot of public speaking too. I’ve never been confined by a set schedule, I always try to be open. When you’re working on a book do you give yourself a schedule?

OM: Yeah. I do that no matter what I’m working on because I’m both very ADD and also extremely workaholic, and those don’t always go together. So it really helps me to plan my day, like any day, even if there’s nothing happening. It’s important for me to designate ‘these hours are for this’, whether it’s taking the dogs out on a hike, going to the post office, and then going back to work for this many hours. Because working alone nobody can see the progress I’m making but me, and sometimes the progress I make – especially in novel writing – looks like subtraction instead of addition. So time is the only thing that I can really control in that process.
EK: Do you base your protagonists and plots on experiences you have gone through yourself?

OM: I don’t think that they’re really based on me, however, I think they are parts of me that I have not yet fully explored. Not that I necessarily feel that I am a character when I’m writing, but you do have to really method act your way into knowing what it would feel like to be the characters. So it’s a little bit like I’m discovering parts of myself but also creating them imaginatively, which is generative and different but also a total reflection of what I think and what I can imagine. It’s also a reflection of what I’m taking in from the world and knitting into the sense of a different person. My experiences during the writing process – people, places, major events, health issues – anything that is happening is going to influence my book. So it becomes a process of really being attentive to what the universe is showing you and finding inspiration in that for this other character’s life. Writing a book is this very weird, reflective trip.
EK: I ask because I feel like a lot of the themes in your work are ones I relate to, or [that] have come up in my work. Obviously, I don’t write books, but I have experience with a lot of mental health issues and that really informs my work. How I got started was by talking about anxiety from first-hand experience. In your books where those themes come up, like addiction or body image, does it feel like a way to be vulnerable about things that you’ve experienced as well?

OM: Yes and no, because when I’m writing I’m honing something and also controlling it. Feeling anxiety is a separate activity from let’s say, writing a screenplay in which one of the characters is extremely anxious. So I might understand that when I’m anxious I do weird self-soothing things or whatever and I might instinctively go, “OK, the guy is going to be playing with this little bit of paper in this interview.” So I can get involved, but it’s sort of like you were saying, when you hit upon a challenge, a problem, it directs you where to go down the life path. I feel the same way with writing. I know this experience of insomnia, for example, and I can use this. This is something that I now have a deeper understanding of. I’ve experienced it personally and therefore I’m a better authority on this other character who is not me and has a totally different personality [or] life situation but is going through the same human thing.
EK: I find it fascinating. I started my podcast after I had spent half a year in a psychiatric unit, and I was at a place where I had yet to accept what I had just gone through. I think I felt a lot of internal shame. “All my friends are doing X, Y, and Z and I’m sitting here in this unit feeling very confused like, “This is not where I should be in my life.”” It was easier to talk to other people about their shit than it was to share my own. That’s how it started. There was comfort and safety in talking to other people about like, “Hey, what are you going through? What was that time when you had very severe insomnia or that time when you were struggling with a very severe eating disorder?” Then very slowly I began talking more about my experiences. There’s something courageous about being vulnerable and talking about these things. It’s still very taboo.

OM: Why do you think it’s still so taboo?
EK: I think to be in the eyes of society, you don’t want things that are holding you back. And if you struggle with your mental health people are judgemental. Even looking back at my own education in high school or college, we never talked about that stuff. People rarely talk about emotions, it’s not something that I feel our society or culture rewards.

OM: I totally agree.
EK: Especially with social media and how it affects people, just having everything so available, [including] everyone’s opinions of you. Never before in history has it been so accessible to see other people’s opinions. Now everyone feels like they have a seat at the table. You could see a random person who you would never come across and maybe you don’t respect their opinion and they’re not very educated on the specific topic, or they don’t know a lot about writing or whatever, but you put out a book, they read it, they have a very negative opinion and you can quickly see it. I think that is very disorientating.

OM: It’s very different because for instance, when I came of age you had to call your friend’s house and ask if they were home. That meant that you had to talk to the dad, the mom, the babysitter, the older brother, whatever. There was a lot less secrecy in a way because things were happening in real life way more than they are now, when everything is virtual. I think that forms the way you relate to yourself as a persona, as a person who has friends, relationships, an appearance, a size, all those things, in a totally different way. From my perspective as an… old person, it was less superficial. And that is what would be really fucked up for me, like if I had to redo high school and everybody was obsessed with Instagram filters – I mean, I don’t even know if that’s really how kids feel. Maybe kids now are like, “Whatever.” But that would be a big mind fuck – and also very boring.
EK: I was just having a conversation with my boyfriend who’s seven years older than me and he was asking, “Did you ever experience dating without a cell phone, or going to a party and people are talking and dancing and kissing?” He’s like, “We used to play spin the bottle!” I feel like today when I go to a party everyone’s sitting on their cell phones. It’s very interesting – how is the culture shifting because of that? And will there be a massive pendulum swing? I wonder if younger generations will be very anti-social media or anti-cell phones because of the effects it’s having. These are conversations I’ve had with experts and doctors on my podcasts, discussing how it’s affecting our brain health and memory. Apparently, the rates of depression and anxiety skyrocketed when the front-facing camera was introduced. It was a huge shift in lack of self-esteem, being able to see yourself in that view.

OM: That’s really interesting. The technology is also providing a system by which you can start measuring these things. I mean, we didn’t go around asking people if they were insecure in the 80s. It wasn’t something that we talked about.
EK: What kind of work do you feel is important to be making now? Or do you even feel that pressure?

OM: The pressure I feel is that I want the work to be important to me. So much has shifted since the pandemic and I think an existential awareness has got all of us [realising that] our time here is limited, it’s really valuable and we’re not going to get it back. So yes, there are a lot of things that require time and patience to earn skills and experience and to grow. Like, you can’t miss that. But I also know that I don’t need to be a billionaire. I need to be happy. I need to be loving my life, doing what makes me feel sure that I’m fully engaging with the journey that’s been gifted to me. It feels important to make work that’s coming from a deep place of honesty and as cheesy as it sounds, loving being alive. What about you?
EK: Finding what gives me meaning – that is the through line. That can change, and I think it is changing and evolving. Feeling like I’m proud of what I’m putting out, and if it can help one person, if they can relate to it or it makes them feel a little less alone, then that’s what makes me feel good at the end of the day.