About the Work: “American Girl” by Marne Litfin

In our “About the Work” series, Olga Mexina and Tom Sokolowski ask recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Marne Litfin's work in SER Vol. 42.1.

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I started working on "American Girl" in 2021 when everything was still shut down. During the early pandemic, I got deep into 90s nostalgia Twitter. I found a lot of comfort in looking at photos of old malls. I wrote a story about a girl who works at Build-A-Bear and thought maybe I'd try to write a whole book of short stories set at different mall stores. But then the great algorithm introduced me to @klit.klittredge, an epic American Girl-themed meme and shitposting account that has since been banned from Twitter for impersonating American Girl. She is absolutely brilliant. Her account connects this very hyper-specific cultural moment to progressive, leftist, anti-capitalist politics in a way that got me thinking more deeply about money and class and how the dolls played a role in the development of my class consciousness. A friend recently pointed out that one of the most interesting things about this story is that the dolls mean completely different things to the two main characters; neither one is really able to access the other's experience, no matter how aggressively they try to share it.

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MARNE LITFIN is a Helen Zell fellow in fiction at the University of Michigan. You can find their stories and comics at Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, Passages North, on The Moth Radio Hour podcast and elsewhere. Say hi on Twitter @JetpackMarne.

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