Her buzzy new novel is a millennial time capsule, dripping with American Apparel and AIM angst

If you've ever pirated music from LimeWire on your parent's desktop PC, bought an American Apparel LBD from a thrift store in a pinch or chatted with your crush on AOL Instant Messenger, Gabrielle Korn's "Long Island Girls" may be the millennial time capsule you've been longing for.

"Specificity is the gateway to universality," Korn says from a corner table at Silver Lake's Botanica. "When you're alone with a story for so long, people saying they relate to it is the best gift."

The former editor in chief of Nylon (a.k.a. the 2000s' ultimate indie culture and fashion glossy), Korn's penned a collection of essays, "Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes," and two cli-fi dystopian novels, "Yours for the Taking" and "The Shutouts."

Her new book, which hit bookshop shelves this month, is a pivot for the author. Korn says she doesn't think about genre when she sits down to write, but this one draws from her own experience working in media, "specifically the Nylon of it all."

"Long Island Girls" spills over with cultural references and generational nods that place readers in a time machine, with destinations that explore Long Island in the aughts, Brooklyn in 2010 and modern-day Los Angeles. The novel follows Susan, a queer creative untangling the coulda, woulda, shoulda situationship that has spanned decades, while grappling with the reality of a career that dips and shifts in a changing media landscape.

"I think the angst - it's anger, and sadness," Korn says as she takes a sip of her matcha latte. "She had to invent herself … she is making up her life as she goes."

The Times sat down with Korn to chat about nostalgia, the coming-of-age-queer experience and making art under capitalism.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Are you the voice of the Indie Sleaze generation?

I don't think that's for me to decide.

What is the timeline for a past era to officially become nostalgic?

I didn't set out to write something nostalgic. That word did not occur to me until we were talking about marketing. I was trying to capture specific time periods, and then I think in the process of doing that, and the process of having a character who's constantly looking back on those time periods, it by default starts to feel nostalgic, but that wasn't really top of mind.

What's so funny is I think we all thought we were having this very niche alt experience. But if we were all having it, then is it really niche? Or was it actually very mainstream?

We all thought we were so edgy and alternative.

We were on the edge.

The book jumps from the age of 17 - when teens feel like they're an adult, but they're not - to then being 22, 27, 32 and 37. What was it like trying to pinpoint those experiences?

I feel like I carry all of those versions of myself - it's actually not that hard to think like a 17 year old or a 21 year old, so it was really fun. One thing I wanted to capture about early adulthood is the constant humiliation. The thing about being young is that people are so mean to you and they're constantly taking advantage, and they're so resentful of your youth, but you don't understand that it's resentment, you just think everybody hates you.

It's a very vulnerable period of time when you're trying to figure out what it means to be an adult who can take care of yourself, and the people who are supposed to be mentoring you are just making fun of you all the time, especially at work - that was really important to me to show.

Then the added layers of trying to date as a queer person from a conservative suburb. I felt like if I could make myself cringe, then it was working.

I think of the character Jonny as this amazing, queer, fairy godmother. Was that Jonny's purpose when you were writing?

Yeah, it was. I wanted to give her someone who would be her guiding light - the kind of person we all wish that we had had. Also through him, we get to watch as Susan becomes disillusioned with the thing that she idolized the most: the music industry.

He is this hero to her, and the more she gets to know him, the more she realizes how hard his life is, and how poorly he's treated, and the fact that he's working his ass off at a day job to support his music, instead of being this kind of successful free spirit that she assumed he was, and so, through getting to know him, she starts to understand who has a right to make art under capitalism.

That reminds me of my favorite line from the book, when Susan learns that Ramona (frontwoman ofthe Monas) is living in a professionally cleaned brownstone that her parents pay for and thinks, "I'm just learning a lot about who gets to make art in this city."

I think that there's so much free labor that goes into making art that comes out in any form, whether it's publishing a book or painting or writing for TV, or whatever it is, you're doing it for free until someone pays you, and that's such a luxury.

I realized it when I started writing my first book, while working full time, and only having nights and mornings to do it. When I started working at Netflix in L.A., we would have these creator meetings and hearing about how long they had been working on something before Netflix bought it, I just started to feel like I have no idea how anybody is affording to make anything unless there's a secret financial thing that we just don't know about.

You've said that this is the most vulnerable book you've ever written. Why?

I put so much of my feelings into it. It's completely fiction. Susan is not me. Her story is very much her own story, but I feel like I put everything I know about life and love and friendship into it, and in a way that makes it feel very raw.

My other books were really focused on making a point - they're climate fiction, with mostly queer characters, and they're very political. The stakes are global. In a way, they're much bigger books, and more complicated too. "Long Island Girls," to me, is about like relationships and feelings.

Let's talk about the angst and awkwardness of teenage attraction.

I think that to realize that you're queer in the early 2000s when there were no role models and everybody was so homophobic, it really took an act of bravery. When we first meet her, she's not a super brave character, she is a rule follower, she is the designated driver, literally and metaphorically. Even though she appears really edgy, she's trying so hard to be good. So her queerness is kind of counter to her self-image and once she embraces it, she embraces it.

Do you have a playlist for this book?

Yes, it's public. It's called "Long Island Girls" and it's just my name on Spotify. I made it after I was done, but it's a lot of the music I was listening to while I was writing, and it's a lot of the references from the book. So anytime Susan mentions a song, I put it on the playlist. It's very much Susan's playlist.

If you had to curate a quick three-book reading list that complements "Long Island Girls," what would you pick?

"A Visit From the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan. "Deep Cuts" by Holly Brickley. "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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This story was originally published June 30, 2026 at 3:13 AM.