Tea Hacic-Vlahovic: On Blending Fashion into Fiction, Punk Rock, Parties and Her Novel, "A Cigarette Lit Backwards"
A Cigarette Lit Backwards is a raw and unflinching look into the punk scene during the early 2000s, a time Hacic-Vlahovic calls “the beginning of the end” of physical subculture spaces. The book follows Kat, a smart but insecure teenager desperate to fit in with the eclectic punk crowd in North Carolina. This book portrays a time, place, and scene still untainted by internet culture, which Hacic-Vlahovic seeks to capture through blunt and witty prose.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Tea about blending fashion into fiction, finding muses in parties, and the role of music in her writing.
Kasia Merrill: What compelled you to write a novel set specifically in the punk scene in the early 2000s in North Carolina?
Tea Hacic-Vlahovic: The book is based on my real experience growing up in North Carolina in the punk scene. Of course, the whole Trippy Dope narrative is fiction. Trippy Dope is a fake persona based on a mix of rock stars. But I got the idea to write it because I was just doom-scrolling online and noticing how the kids these days engage with a lot of subculture-adjacent fashion and music and language, et cetera. But a lot of them don't seem to have a physical scene anymore. Pop culture is dead. It's all about online culture. I wanted to write a book that captured what it felt like to be a teenager who had to physically go somewhere to be a part of a scene. It was something I wanted to do not just for my generation, but for the next generation as well.
KM: I love that. So you’re capturing the physical space, as well as the anxieties and concerns specific to that culture.
THV: Yeah. It was a very strange and particular time to be a teenager because we had chat rooms and MySpace. We started getting flip phones. It was the beginning of the end. The 2000s punks were already posers. They were already nostalgic for the seventies and the nineties. It’s bizarre to think that now kids are doing 2000s nostalgia.
KM: A lot of people either love or hate reading and writing through teens’ perspectives. What was it like writing through teenage Kat's perspective in this book? Was it challenging to revisit that teenage mentality?
THV: It was a bit challenging for me because my first book, Life of the Party, is about a girl in her twenties and she's already very sure about her opinions, even if a lot of them are wrong and based on trauma. But this character is just now trying to figure out what her opinions are. She admires her friends who argue their opinions because she doesn't really have hers yet. I was tempted a lot of times to make something easily funnier for the reader. But I had to strip Kat down to being a curious earnest try-hard little girl, who throughout the book becomes genuinely more hardened and more secure in who she is.
KM: I think that's a hard part of writing a teenager. You're trying to encapsulate a character who internally has a childish perspective, but externally feels that they are an adult.
THV: Right. And sometimes she makes decisions that as a reader or as an adult, you're like, ‘why did she just contradict herself?’ But as a teenager, you're constantly trying on new personalities. You're trying out new ways of being and sometimes it's a flop and then you restart the next day. When I got the hang of it, I really enjoyed it.
KM: I read that you studied fashion in Milan. In the first few chapters of A Cigarette Lit Backwards, there's a lot of descriptions of the outfits. Why do you think is important to describe fashion, particularly when we're writing about subcultures? What relationship do these two interests and passions of yours have with each other?
THV: First of all, I will say that sometimes I haven't been able to get through a book I was otherwise enjoying because there will be a character that I imagined one way, and then halfway through the book, the author dresses them terribly. I’m a person that cares a lot about identity. A character that walks around in Lululemon every day is a different type of person than one who walks around in a studded jacket. It's just the truth. I make a point to describe how people are dressed very early on in my work. I think the way people dress is extremely important. It's really fundamental. I went to study fashion in Milan and the funny thing was, my knowledge of fashion in North Carolina was just subculture based. It was centered around what color laces you had in your Doc Martens. The way you flip your collar or put a bandana in your pocket, it says a lot about you. I come to Milan, fashion's a whole different thing. It's a business and it's fantasy. It's people ripping off subcultures and street kids to make a profit. I was very disillusioned with the real world of fashion once I got there. I wish people utilized fashion in their writing more often, to be honest. It's such an easy way to describe a character. You can tell a lot of about a character by just describing how they wear their socks, you know what I mean? We pick up on that stuff constantly, whether we're aware of it or not.
KM: One of the most compelling aspects of your writing is how honest and raw you are. What topics do you find difficult to write about, and how do you approach writing them?
THV: A lot of things I write about have been difficult. My first book, Life of the Party, deals with sexual abuse and trauma. While writing it, I ended up crying because I untapped a memory. But I think that if writing something feels difficult, it probably means that you should be writing it. If it feels safe, what's the point? I was really worried what my family was going to think about my first book. But if you're not afraid of what your parents are going to think of your writing, should you even publish it? I think it’s especially difficult to write in a nuanced honest way about the complexities of being a girl taken advantage of by a guy. It’s not as easy as getting out of a bad situation. Sometimes, you need that situation, and you need those relationships. There's a scene in A Cigarette Lit Backwards where Kat flippantly describes being taken advantage of by her male friends at a skate park and she says that afterwards, rather than never talking to them again, she tries to be closer to them because she wants to prove herself.
KM: In A Cigarette Lit Backwards, you pull in a lot of movie quotes and song lyrics from different sources, ranging from Beauty and the Beast to Bikini Kill. Why do you think it's important to include outside sources in your writing, and how do you choose what to include?
THV: In my first book, I do the same thing. I think it's important to show a person doesn't come from nothing. We're all born somewhere. We all have a certain astrological sign. We all have certain parents, but what we grow up watching and listening to contributes more than anything else. And for Kat’s particular generation, she couldn't endlessly find influences from TikTok. She was influenced by the things that were on Cartoon Network and the music that she was able to shoplift from music shops. Maybe the kids that are now teenagers will write books in their thirties and be quoting influencers, which is very interesting. But we were still in that age of innocence where, for better or worse, you only had what was on TV. You had TRL and you had to run to be there on time for your favorite program.
KM: Since this book is set in the punk scene, there's a huge influence of music. Do you listen to music while you write? Do you have a habit of using music in your work?
THV: Absolutely. I used to have this trick when I had to write articles in in Milan. If I had writer’s block and come up with something brilliant, I would write out my favorite song lyrics. I figured that if my fingers were writing something genius, it would make it easier for them to later write their own genius thing. I don't know if it ever worked, but I learned how to write from songs. My favorite authors are punk rock musicians. I was very lucky to have Greg, the lead singer from the Bouncing Souls, blurb the book. He’s in the book and he’s my hero. He’s a brilliant songwriter. I think some punk rock lyrics are better than a lot of books I've read. I can't write without music.
KM: What's your writing process like and how often do you write?
THV: I try to write every day. Sometimes days go by when I'm worthless. But I usually have some work thing I have to do, like a deadline or an article. I write the best at night. It's an old habit from college where I was writing my blogs and my columns after school and I'd come home drunk and write all night. So I think I'm used to doing that. I'm on writers' Twitter and everyone's always complaining about writing. For me, it's the only thing that I've ever wanted to do more than anything else. I hated sewing. I hated studying. Writing was always the only thing that I couldn't wait to do. I'm lucky. When I'm at a party. I'd rather be at home writing about the party.
KM: What do you find compelling about writing about parties? Why is it important?
THV: I was a party girl in Milan and in North Carolina. I loved going out. Being out at night is when the world changes. When I went to these parties in Milan, I was witnessing the birth of new fashion brands and artists coming up with their concepts and people talking and people doing drugs and dancing. There's nothing more compelling or interesting than a room full of people trying their hardest to be compelling and interesting. It’s the one part of the day when people go out and they're trying so hard to just be a character. I mean, they're doing the writing for you.
KM: It's like catching people at their most humanness.
THV: Yeah. They’re trying to be heard and observed. Maybe they are hoping that a writer or an artist is going to use what they're doing that night. That's the dream: you go out and you become someone's muse by accident.
KM: Are you working on any other new projects?
THV: I'm almost done with my third book. I'm happy with it, but the second half always comes easier. The first half is the hardest because you have to figure out what you're going to write. Each book is less based on reality. The first one was basically just the truth. A Cigarette Lit Backwards is very much fiction. This third one is the most fiction I've ever written, but it's still planted in realities from Los Angeles and New York. It's about the literary scene.
Tea Hacic-Vlahovic is a Croatian-American writer based in Los Angeles. She has contributed to numerous publications, including i-D, Dazed, Oyster, Flaunt, and Autre magazines and has also served as a columnist for Vice and Wired Italy, a contributing editor for Wonderland magazine, and the director of Bullett TV. In spring 2020 her first novel, Life of the Party, was released in the United States by Clash Books to critical acclaim. It was an instant bestseller in Italy and is soon to be a film.
About the interviewer
Kasia Merrill is a fiction writer based in Maryland. She holds an MFA in creative writing and works as a publishing director for a children’s publishing house. Her fiction has appeared in Breadcrumbs Mag and Fiction International, and in 2022, she was selected to be a Peter Taylor fellow for the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop. She is currently at work on her first novel.
