Catching Up With Thora Birch

She epitomized the angsty ’90s teen both on-screen and off. Then her career took a turn. But with a bit role in a buzzy new TV show threatening to thrust birch back into the spotlight, former Nylon staffer Kate Williams sits down with the American Beauty and ghost world star to glean some guidance on everything from mid-career changeups to the human condition. 

- Kate Williams

I considered myself to be a Ghost World fan. I referred to shitty bands as “Blues Hammer,” and shitty art as “tampon in a teacup.” I was well versed in the survival mechanisms of pre-Internet teenagers, which this particular film portrayed so well. Enid and Rebecca knew what my friends and I knew: that the only way to avoid dying of boredom in a cultural wasteland was to put on your ironic armor and embrace everything you hated.

So, in 2008, when I was a senior editor at NYLON and tasked with writing an homage to the 2001 cult classic, I did zero research. I knew the movie so well that fact-checking seemed redundant…or so I thought.

Imagine the horror when it came to my attention that I had called Enid “Edith”—in print. I still don’t know how it happened. Even worse, it didn’t register until we received a note from a reader who pointed it out. We ran the letter, I felt intense amounts of shame, and then moved on.

Recently, however, the opportunity to interview Thora Birch—the actress who made Enid Coleslaw who she was, who made her everything I loved, who owned the Y2Ks with this role as well as a starring one in the Academy Award-winning American Beauty—fell into my lap like some kind of gift from the universe. Finally, a chance to right my wrong!

I was also dying to know what Birch has been up to for the past decade and a half. Instead of taking the path one would expect of a critical darling with back-to-back blockbusters under her belt, she went on to appear in straight-to-DVD horror flicks and TV movies. She never stopped working—next month she’ll appear in two episodes of USA Network’s alien drama “Colony”—but for the past few years, Googling her name turned up mainly “What happened to…” articles.