Simone O. Elias – Quotes from Internet Archive HQ on August 4, 2026

On Publishing:

"I was signed with a New York agent who called me the next Elizabeth Wurtzel and the voice of a generation—and then he did not read my book. He proceeded to say, 'Give me six months and give me six months and give me six months.'"

"It felt very barbaric to me to be, 'Oh, I have to ask this guy who's off in New York to read my story, vindicate it, send it to another guy who's going to send it to another guy, and then girls can read it and feel seen.' The publishing bureaucratic time is so Kafkaesque."

"The homogenization of the way that we write, it all sort of sounds the same now to me. I wanted those sharp edges. I wanted to sound like someone who's angry and also has citations."

"I was never asking for, 'Oh, I want a review in The New Yorker,' because that's just not what matters. It's just so obvious to me that the literary world is under this spell... I don't want to play that. What you can win is actually having an impact on people, and that's what open access allows you to do."

"I have two books published now, which is the number of books both of my grandfathers have published. And those books were about cancer, the Holocaust, and OJ Simpson. And so I've added to that mental illness and female rage, and I think it's the real cherry on top."

On that “Pilates Princess” Chapter:

"I learned honestly about how evil things hide themselves under pretty cases... I sort of saw the line between the concept of the banality of evil and how oftentimes the most evil things hide themselves in pretty or at least just mundane everyday life."

"It's a bait and switch. This chapter starts with me ordering a smoothie and going to a Pilates class... and it ends in fascism and declaring to kill an entire archetype."

"The modern cage... is the culmination of all the cages we're living in."

"I have been institutionalized, and so I know exactly what it looks like when someone's dying of an eating disorder... Someone dies of an eating disorder every 50 minutes. Oftentimes it's women, and that's directly a result of our society, and we think of that as just being normal. It's hidden in plain sight."

"My favorite uninspiring inspirational quote is ‘if you're going through hell, keep going.’ It's Winston Churchill. And I'm pretty sure Winston Churchill has never been to hell."

On the “Pop Stardom and Roe” Chapter:

“Pop stardom is often seen as something frivolous when it’s one of the biggest ways to make political change that we have.”

On the “Barbie” Chapter:

"Back then we used to have like, oh, these are two best friends. They're going to go on a road trip... It was just odd. We need more oddness. We need more reality instead of these big blockbusters standing in the place of real humanity.”

"1930s pre-code cinema gave women more moral complexity than most of what's available to Gen Z now, and that's what we've traded for with our safe escapism movies."

“The number one thing they're afraid of in those boardrooms is risk. The audiences sometimes matter, but these executives are going to be in those chairs for a long time, deciding the same things over and over again. Instead of ‘we're going to workshop the ultimate female character for our audiences that's politically correct.’ That's going to fail. You need to actually get these people in the room if you want to represent them.”

On the “Parallax Method”:

"The parallax method is immune to AI writing because it is very weird and it is also very accurate. No real AI system would write about Pilates and then link it to a Nazi magazine and then link it to their own family history."

On the Book’s Thesis:

"I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness... destroyed by culture and also saved by it."

On Marketing:

"People spend so much money trying to figure out what Gen Z actually wants. They don't ask Gen Z. It's the most stupid thing."

"I'm pretty convinced that 50% of people are just batshit... but there's cool batshit, and then there's bad bad batshit. I am also cool batshit."

"People always go nuts on X... but I'm not on X, so yeah, suck it."

On the Writing Process:

"It feels like I'm a transcriber of my own subconscious... like I'm watching a movie and I'm trying to transcribe the movie."