From The Guardian:
What do we mean when we say a novel is a “sad girl novel”? I could list a dozen popular novels published over the last few years that have had this term slapped on them. What do they have in common? Most often a protagonist who is at times miserable and disaffected, who is suffering under capitalism, who is ambivalent about their sexual experiences and their relationships with others. Usually they are highly educated and frequently analyse their own situation. Sometimes they are grieving, often they are bored. By this metric Karl Ove Knausgaard is perhaps our foremost sad girl novelist, a master of the form. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life also meets many of these criteria, as does Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe. You might even call this type of novel the dominant mode in literary fiction – so why is it a girl problem?
The term sad girl novel is sometimes used interchangeably with “cool girl novel”, another dubious term that lambasts women for, among other things, dressing well and throwing parties. We’re free to like or dislike any of these books, and there’s no question that – just as in publishing more generally – middle-class and white stories continue to dominate, but lumping unrelated novels by women together whether their characters lie in bed all day or stay out all night is hardly identifying a coherent literary phenomenon. Describing Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts as sad would be like describing American Psycho as sad. When I read Natasha Brown’s Assembly, I don’t find sadness. I find glittering, righteous anger. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist’s detached register carries anger and grief. Indeed, a lot of what we’re identifying vaguely as “sadness”, is rage.
Perhaps we aren’t able to identify more complex emotions, in particular those that are unpleasant, like anger, in these novels, because of our increasingly infantilised view of women authors. Everywhere we look, women are being en-cutened, via “girl dinners” (meals, but smaller), “hot girl walks” (walks), “girl math” (inaccurate calculations). What seems to have begun as a self-deprecating in-joke has risen in popularity alongside frightening and reactionary ideas about women’s roles online (the surging popularity of tradwife content for example). I return again and again, pissed off, to this quote from Ursula Le Guin on the so-called cult of women’s knowledge:
All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
If things described as “girl” are cuter, smaller, sillier, then what does that mean a “girl novel” is? A novel, but not as important?
There are more novels being published by women than ever, and the readers of novels are also overwhelmingly female: according to YouGov, more than a quarter (27%) of women read daily, compared to a sixth (13%) of men. Men are also less likely to be readers overall, with 22% saying they never read, compared to 12% of women. But this is no guarantee that fiction by women about women garners respect. Instead, it is still variously considered to be frivolous, boring, overwritten, underwritten, too violent, too passive, unrealistic, thinly veiled autobiography, and so on and so on. Consider the Madievsky rule, the writer Ruth Madievsky’s theory that 3.5 stars on Goodreads is the best score you can get for contemporary literary fiction written by women about women (writing by men tends to sit comfortably around 4).
Link to the rest at The Guardian
Perhaps one of the commenters could explain to PG why male authors appear to do well by writing Sad Girl novels.
Sounds like the epitome of “maybe this (male in this case) author doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
We’ve had complaints about non-autistic people writing about autistic people – and getting it weird; non-Mexican people writing about escaping Mexico on a train, etc.
It’s a valid way of writing: not bothering with research, but just writing your feelings as if you were the person you think you’re writing – which gives the world a laundry list of your prejudices. Just be honest about it and don’t try to pretend that’s not what you’re doing.
Then there’s “doing your research – poorly” and writing from there.
Or using a name that you hope readers will identify as one thing, when it’s something else (André Norton, anyone? Currer Bell?). For valid or invalid reasons, among them being money and readers with prejudices.
It’s an additional layer, part of the story, the wrapper in shiny expensive metallic paper.
Or, you could, you know, stop playing that particular game, and just do your research and write with your own name, and let the chips fall where they choose.
Protagonists that are active, that actually do something, are generally more appealing as subjects of interest. Even children’s books don’t dwell on solipsistic reactions to the ordinary events of life — that’s how their readers are meant to learn how to grow up.
A protag can be passive and sad/angry, but a story about nothing but inner life is unlikely to go anywhere or satisfy anybody. There’s no story arc if sad-girl just gets sad some more. Where’s the growth? And without story evidence of try/fail, where’s the tragedy?
The kind of story you’re describing — the passive protag who steadfastly refuses to protag — is typically modern-day “litra-cha.” It’s exactly the type of story the average person despises. To riff off Robert McKee’s “anti-plots,” these are anti-stories because there’s no plot or character arc. I will never understand why these kind of non-stories were ever lauded, but I’m not going to feel sorry for writers who refuse to write stories and are naturally unloved as a result.
Side note, I clicked on this article because I initially thought it was talking about actual tragic heroines, a la the “sad girl” in Lana Del Rey’s Sad Girl. FYI, the song is about an unrepentant mistress, and someone made a fan video set to “Anna Karenina.”** And that’s “tragic heroine” with an emphasis on the classic definition of tragedy, where a person goes from being socially integrated to being socially outcast, having fallen from grace due to a fatal flaw. Which would necessarily require a plot and an actual character arc. Exactly what the anti-story writers refuse to write.
**The video looks lush and everyone is gorgeous; I may have to move AK up in my to-read pile so I can see the movie 🙂
Perhaps because critics like this one gush approvingly of novels about women that do only that?
I read many novels by women – but they don’t try to write only to women. And their characters, both female and male, do quite a bit of thinking. But I don’t believe that this critic would care much for them – there’s a lot of that “damaging” capitalism in them.