It’s a Thursday afternoon at the Chateau Marmont, and Helena has appropriately just read Susan Sontag’s Notes on “Camp”. She’s a voracious reader, so I ask her if she would ever write a book. “I think it’s morally wrong to write a book before you’re 30,” she declares. “Maybe when I’m older and out of this phase of my life where I’m being sexy on the internet. Right now, I’m having fun online.” With her long red hair and striking freckled face, Helena could convincingly pass as an actress or an off-duty popstar while eyeing the menu. The restaurant is vacant for a Thursday afternoon; except for a handsome blonde man playing with a toddler so cheerfully that it looks like they should be in an IKEA catalog. Our waiter teases Helena, who arrives a cool ten minutes late, for keeping me waiting. She charmingly protests while ordering: “Listen. I’m just a girl.”
Helena is not just a girl. On Twitter, she’s known as @freshhel and, in the last few years, she’s racked up 137,500 followers, becoming something of a cult of personality on the platform. She recently moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — with her Pomeranian named Dove and a cat named Printer — to pursue vague Hollywood ambitions (explaining that she occasionally zooms with a CAA agent to discuss this). At the beginning of our lunch, I tell Helena that I’ve been bragging about meeting her to friends, who are fans of her Twitter. She seems genuinely bewildered by this. “It’s bizarre because I’m known, but I’ve never done anything. I don’t do anything,” she replies.
Helena’s eating a steak while, once again, Twitter is being eulogized and declared dead online. Followers are vowing to flee the platform to protest the Elon Musk regime and the app‘s changes. Helena just shrugs. “I’m like, ‘Thank god, we’re done.’ Because I’ve said my shit,” she says. “I’m not very attached to it.” In fact, she looks forward to a life where Twitter is behind her. “I can’t wait to be old and selling candy at a farmer’s market and not even thinking about any of this,” she muses. Candy is something of an obsession for Helena; she’s been lucratively filming herself eating candy on OnlyFans for a while now. “I’ve definitely had weeks of my life where I’ve been like, ‘I’m going to start a candy company’.”
If Twitter is dead though, Helena will go down as having authored some of its most legendary tweets. Among them, “Ohhhh my god, u had an iced coffee to eat today? Should we tell everyone? should we throw a party? should we invite bella hadid?” Another classic: “Glossier is at sephora now.. in case any of u were looking for something to say to your boyfriend.” Her quips, often incomplete sentences and scattered thoughts, range from online shopping to skin care and they’ve seemingly birthed a syntax that’s been mimicked and reproduced ever since. Over lunch, I find myself likening her voice online to poets like E.E. Cummings or Sylvia Plath. Helena agrees: “I’ve always had a very specific relationship with words. In high school, I wanted to be a poet, so presenting an idea in the simplest language possible is my favorite thing to do.”
Alongside poetry, Helena credits rappers like Nicki Minaj and Eminem for informing her economy of words. “I think rappers are some of the most poetic joke writers of all time. Nicki Minaj specifically,” she says. “That had a vast influence on my thinking process and my brain in general.”
Recently, her online fame has begun spilling into real life as followers occasionally recognize her in public. “It happened once at the airport when I was crying, and it was the weirdest moment of my life,” Helena says. “You go to an airport, and there’s something about it that makes me emotional. I was having an Eat, Pray, Love moment at the airport and some teenage girl recognized me.” Her specific brand of fame seems to be evocative of our current authenticity-obsessed moment: making a spectacle of being a young woman in the world.
Helena’s Twitter career began by surprise. Her first viral tweet came from sending selfies to fast-food chains. “I thought it was funny to send a sexy selfie to Arby’s and McDonald’s in DMs. And sometimes they would respond like, ‘horny,’ as the brand,” she says. During the pandemic, her Twitter following exploded, which she attributes to the sudden abundance of free time away from various service jobs — even one at a candy shop in the Mall of America. “My whole early adulthood, I was working 45 hours a week and I didn’t have time to think about myself in the same way,” she says. “I didn’t have access to my whole life like I did when it was the pandemic.” Rachel Sennott was an early fan of Helena’s Twitter, which spurred a friendship. “We would FaceTime sometimes. She’s a big reason why I felt like I could do anything entertainment industry-wise.”
Helena was born in Mankato, Minnesota, and grew up in a Mennonite family, which she describes as “baking-heavy.” While her grandparents lived on a farm, Helena grew up in the suburbs and lived there until she was 22. As a child, she described herself as a freak who occasionally dabbled in slam poetry. “I had undiagnosed ADD and was just all over the place. I had big obsessions. I got obsessed with Twilight and wore a Twilight shirt every day in sixth grade.” After high school, she enrolled and dropped out of community college in one day. Her early ennui drove her to move cities as an adult, most recently to Las Vegas and Denver. She tried performing stand-up comedy, but it wasn’t for her. “Every time I would do a show, I would leave it and say, ‘Ok, I’m going to kill myself. I never want to do that again,’” she says. “But then I would agree to another show, then another show.”
During the pandemic, she retired and redirected her energy toward Twitter. Her tweets are for the girls: “Those are the people I’m trying to make laugh; it’s young women because their lives suck. It sucks to be a young woman so bad,” she says, noting how unforgiving the internet is. “I always see young women’s TikToks being reposted on Twitter and angry guys being like, ‘Why are these teenage girls so stupid?’ If Joe Rogan was like ‘I love Bimbocore,’ a bunch of people would be like, ‘Wow, that’s a really good point.’… Being a beautiful, smart woman with an OnlyFans makes people so pissed off at me.”
Despite this, Helena’s tweets speak to something profound about the banality and drama of the female experience. In conversation, she oscillates between discussing dive bars and her love of Don Delillo novels. “The way that girls talk online is something that is so ever-evolving, and so, it is very exciting to be a part of it in a small way.”
At some point, I ask Helena if she thinks of herself as an online it-girl, which genuinely embarrasses her. “A lot of people are like, ‘I’m a glamorous philosopher. I’m a special lady.’ I think people perform their personalities more than ever now. And I think that I’m too crazy to do that. I can’t pull it off,” she says. Still, Helena possesses effortlessness and poise that is palpable in her online presence. “Going into situations, I have to be like, ‘Everyone loves me. Yay.’ I wake up every morning, and I’m like, ‘Everyone loves me. Yay.’ And then I tweet. And then I have a blast.”
Towards the end of our lunch, I told Helena that she’s one of the few people I’ve met recently who seems to be having fun. Sitting in the shade in the Chateau Marmont, she’s something of a modern-day Eve Babitz, who indulges in pleasure for pleasure’s sake and feels no dread about it. She agrees: “I’m very prone to despair, so I just need all the joy and all the happy stuff. And if I think about it too hard, it stops being fun and stops being happy.”
Credits
Photography Morgan Maher