Sad Girl Lit Crit Is Just Another Way To Dunk On Women

Today what bugs me is the so-called “curse of the cool girl novelist”. It’s one thing to be tired of the sad girl novel; entirely another to lambast its authors. Especially when that criticism is inspired by one of the most vitriolic, misogynistic essays ever written by a woman about other women.

The cool girl author, according to an article-cum-George Eliot tribute from the News Statesman, is the writer of a particular type of novel known as “sad girl lit”. Broadly speaking, the genre is characterised by unlikeable protagonists whose mental and emotional unraveling makes up the main plot of the book. Interspersed throughout readers may also find: navel-gazing monologues, millennial ennui, suicidal ideation, self-defeating behaviour patterns and ambiguously consented-to hookups. So far so glum.

The genre has been enjoying a moment (or a decade), with notable titles including Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein and pretty much anything by Sally Rooney. Ask any reader (and even some authors) and they’ll admit sad girl lit has run its course. The author of the selfconsciously titled 2023 Sad Girl Novel, Pip Finkemeyer, reckons the genre has come full circle, “like a snake eating its tail”.

Even though I personally found Moshfegh’s My Year Of Rest to be an outrageously funny read with an unlikeable heroine I couldn’t help but love, I have no problem admitting, I, too, am tired of sad girl lit. 

So, too, are the countless thought pieces and essays published over the last few years examining, in detail, the genre’s shortcomings. I won’t go into them here, but suffice to say, sad girl lit has overstayed its welcome and pretty much everyone knows it.

But I have a bone to pick with criticism of genre’s authors. To read the Statesman article, they’re all part of the same indistinct mass called “woman writer”, no different from the target of George Eliot’s vitriol in 1856.

Born Mary Ann Evans, Eliot adopted a masculine pen-name and entered Victorian literary canon as one of its most respectable writers. Perhaps her best-known novel is Middlemarch, still assigned in English classrooms to this day. 

In 1856, Eliot published Silly Novels By Lady Novelists, in which she skewered romance writers for lacking the “moral qualities that contribute to literary excellence – patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer’s art.”

They had heads “made of butter”, an old proverb which she adapted to mean they were unprepared for the consequences of sending their work to print. That these lady novelists expected the highest praise for their daft prose and, indeed, received it, irritated Eliot to no end.

Even more egregious, the worse the novel, the more acclaim its airhead author got. “[W]hen a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch,” she wrote. But, when a woman writer reaches excellence, “critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.” 

If this isn’t a classic Pick-Me argument, I don’t know what is. Eliot is throwing other women under the bus for getting what she believes is her due – the (male) critics’ approval. 

She comes across as bitter, misogynistic, desperate to distance herself from lady novelists lest her readers and fellow writers should discover she, too, is a woman. That’s a reprehensible stance at any point in time, but it’s especially unacceptable in 2023.

Still the article about cool girl authors goes to obnoxious lengths to align itself with Eliot.

Where the main complaints don’t directly quote Eliot, they mirror them to a T. The author also focusses less on sad girl lit and more on its authors and their sex, so that the ensuing critique veers dangerously into throwing the author out with the genre, so to speak.

Cool girl writers, we learn, mistake “vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality”, while talking down to the “less enlightened”. Readers get treated to entire paragraphs about the mating patterns of molluscs so the novelist can show off and get a “good girl!” pat on the head. 

If anything, it’s a failure of imagination on the essayist’s part that she can’t fathom any other reason for disconnected segues in a book about a disconnected, over-schooled heroine. But I digress.

The main character is invariably a depressed, numbed-out grad student (to distinguish her from the “common undergraduate masses”) whose eyes rove around her living space with an “unmanned look about them”. The problem with these sad Mary Sues, it’s explained, is they’re walking around with heads full of postmodern concepts such as the individual’s plight under capitalism, second-wave feminism, and “[w]ords like ecocide and patriarchy”. 

What’s more, the cool girl author is guilty of what Eliot called the “most pitiable” type of literary sin – writing not for entertainment but to impress, to serve up a moral lesson, which the article compares to “forcing [readers] to eat their greens.”

If only the cool girl novelist could take their advice and get acquainted with “just proportions”! In other words, know her place. Something women hear all too often, no matter what we do. 

Sad girl lit crit and the cool girl author are just another way of insisting women can do nothing right. 

I agree that there should be more ways for women to succeed in publishing, that authors should feel free to write women in all their complexity, that sad, flat, angsty characters just don’t cut it.

But the article seems more focussed on tearing down the trope and its (highly acclaimed) authors than offering an alternative. And especially tearing them down for being women. It isn’t simply the heroines’ neurotic self-absorption that grates, the alienation from their own bodies. It’s that, in this context, it proves the protagonists have consumed too much second-wave feminism. 

It’s not just that the writing is angsty, perhaps veering towards the fallacy that “unless you’re depressed you’re a frivolous person”. It’s that our cool girl author has been reading too much Sylvia Plath and Audre Lorde.

The only reason the sad girl lit heroine is estranged from herself and her fellow humans, desperate to sleep her life away, is that “alienation is cool,” the article insists. Because, presumably, the empty-headed author has read Sartre and in her ignorance taken him too literally.

In other words, these characters simply happen to be women and the two main plot grooves – their growing despair at, and disassociation from, the deeply dysfunctional world around them, and their being women in it – are unrelated. Any sign of emotional instability is strictly to do with the authors’ (and the characters’) “feminine fatuity”.

It’s hard to believe this Pick-Me-ish critique of women writing about women’s pain (as much as we may be tired of seeing it in bookstores) is anything but an attempt to be “not like the other girls.” Precisely what Eliot’s 1856 essay was doing, albeit with even more overt viciousness.

Near the end, the article concedes the problem with sad girl lit might be that it’s a humourless slog through a singularly sad way of looking at the world, and of being a woman in it. That the genre has run its course and, dear publishing industry, it’s time to turn the page.

But this admission is so lukewarm, and so late in the article, that what stands out the most is its author’s vitriol for women writers of a certain kind. Indeed, she must be trying to pull a George Eliot, style and all, because many of her sentences smack of “not like the other girls” energy. The cool girl novelist has failed at being cool. The jig is up and we can see under the mask of spare prose and curt emotion, where instead of a writer who can play ball, there’s a woman (gasp!). All the while, I can’t help but imagine the article’s author, proud of the unmasking she’s performed, hoping she can one day be lumped in not with them, but with the likes of George Eliot.

Because George Eliot can play ball with the boys. 

This article comes across not as a truth-teller of the contemporary book scene, but as a Pick-Me ready to pick at a genre for the perceived moral failings of its authors. Chief among them: these women just don’t know their place.