When women write complex characters, filled with desire, anger or self-destructive urges, why are their books touted as ‘sad’ and frivolous – unlike those of inward-looking male authors’?
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.
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?
