Chloé Happe’s Desolation E-Girl Disrupts New Mexican Literary Tradition – Emily K. Sipiora
September 14, 2026
I completed my master’s degree in New Mexico, where I encountered the same constellation of writers over and over. Most stories– Anaya, Silko– revolved around identity and belonging, creating an us-versus-them dynamic palpable in most Southwestern literature set in this state. For the past few decades, the mestizo protagonist trying to reconcile their heritage with their desire to achieve in White society has been the primary dramatic device. Chloé Happe’s forthcoming novel Desolation E-Girl, out on September 8th from Louria Books, creates a new kind of New Mexican narrative in its refusal to participate in the traditional identity narrative. Happe, a Millennial, has written a digital native narrative that portrays the state’s desert landscape as the antidote to near terminal internet poisoning instead of characterizing its inhabitants as victims of colonial oppression.
Desolation E-Girl is centered on an online personality named Maya. Maya’s identity is first that she is very online– that she isn’t certain of her purpose in life is her second defining characteristic. The book describes New Mexico as healing, its “enchanted satori mesas” retrieving Maya from the “white noise” of the internet. The events preceding the novel aren’t explicitly stated, but references to a “lawsuit” allude to reality. Readers curious about it will find it isn’t difficult to unearth. When Maya arrives in Santa Fe– or Shambhala, as she affectionately names it– she feels like she must break out of the internet before she loses herself in it. “I thought I could find the Truth on the internet, but whatever “truth” that lives there is muddied and dirty…. To be a successful “Artist” on Twitter, you have to deliver Truth in an ugly way. This is how I gained popularity there, by distorting the Truth into something ugly, so that people look at it, point, and laugh. I thought, well, at least they’re looking,” she admits to herself in one of the book’s characteristic monologues.
The events of Happe’s novel don’t immediately deliver Maya from the internet. When Maya thinks of the female social media battleplace, she remarks: “My body may as well be completely subsumed into the etheric internet realm, body slain and laid upon the altar of Twitter.” One of the first things she does is take numerous photos of the desert for Instagram with the goal of making New York City e-girls jealous. Upon her return to NYC to visit Sovereign House (a defunct Dimes Square event space), she is tempted to return to online cruelty because she’s taken herself out of the desert. She brags to said e-girls: “I’m too cool for New York, I’m doing my own thing now. I’m going my own way, a pioneer out there in New Mexico.”
Desolation E-Girl is best read as a bold, boundary-pushing piece of New Mexican fiction that challenges traditional identity narratives in favor of reinventing the self away from the internet. Maya’s desert rebirthing complex depicts her relapsing into performing for an online audience, even when it’s moved on to something else. The desert pulls her back anyways, refreshing but unable to be refreshed like an app. In one grandiose moment, Maya declares that she’s sick of “liberal-Millennial-coastal-elites” she encounters who have “desecrated” Shambhala. She plans to “make the Wild West Wild again”, meaning that she intends to live her life from now on in the real world. Maya writes “I am not an E-Girl, I am an artist” on her mirror. This is the novel’s takeaway: Millennials like Happe envision a more daring literary scene in New Mexico.
Emily K. Sipiora is a Mexican-American poet and the Creative Director of internet literature podcast VICTIM RADIO. Her work appears in Spectra Poets, The Chicago Review of Books, UnHerd, and elsewhere. Emily’s website, 5312, is a monthly internet literature publication. She lives in the Land of Enchantment, but is from Rockford, Illinois.