"Sad girl lit"

[Hopscotch]

Why am I always the last to know about the latest trend?:

‘A smorgasbord of unlikability’: the authors helping ‘sad girl lit’ grow up - The Guardian 8 AUG 2023

“...If you’ve read a book by a woman, about a woman, that has been published in the last five years, then it’s overwhelmingly likely that...[t]he narrative...circled around this character’s sadness, her passive struggle to overcome it, and little else. Typically, such stories have notes of darkness but will rarely deliver the actual thing. Usually the main character (like the author) will be middle-class, if not incredibly wealthy. Almost always she will be white. The book’s cover will probably feature a devastated-looking woman with her hair covering her face or her head cradled in her hands.

“What you’ll have been reading is sad girl literature – a trend in literary fiction that has come to dominate publishing in the last decade. Books in this genre focus on navel-gazing characters defined by their vulnerability and erratic behaviour. The popularity of these books is difficult to overstate: you can see it in the commercial success of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation..., Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss – all of which continue to feature on bestseller lists and on viral BookTok videos years after publication....

“Despite reaching what feels like a saturation point, the sad girl genre shows few signs of waning....[Author] Rachel Connolly believes publishers look for books that are flattering to the reader. ‘The idea that the character is more dysfunctional than the reader can seem appealing,’...

“[Author Pip] Finkemeyer also admits that this genre she loves has some faults....‘There is something problematic about millennial privileged women reading about millennial privileged women who are writing books about millennial privileged women....But there is a universality to these characters’ experience...They will continue on.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/08/a-smorgasbord-of-unlikability-the-authors-helping-sad-girl-lit-grow-up

[writeway]

First time I heard of it and thank goodness I haven't run into it. Not anything I would ever wanna read. I read to escape. I don't wanna read a bunch of sad depressing stuff. If I did I'd read Nicholas Sparks.  This is nothing close to the stuff I read. I don't know what books they are talking about because all the authors I read are women and I haven't seen this. Maybe this is literary fiction or something but again, glad I haven't run into it. I also don't read trade-published books anymore. I can't remember the last time I read a book that wasn't indie. Maybe this is the trend of trade publishing but I'm not seeing it in self-publishing books. Least not the ones I've heard of.

[LilyBLily]

I only read genre fiction and none of these author names are familiar to me. I usually read about people of modest means or people with genuine problems, not upper-middle class privileged elites whose "sadness" relates mostly to their shallowness. Even though women's fiction titles about those women are popular, I don't read or write those.

A standard setup for a genre contemporary romance today is the young woman who has been done out of a deserved promotion and/or fired from her big city job, come home to her apartment to find her fiance having sex with her best friend, and now has nothing and must retreat to the small town of her birth. Meh, but that's a version of sadness that may reflect some of women's genuine frustrations with our current society.

A number of genre contemporary romances and romcom romances start with the heroine making a complete fool of herself. That includes the newly big trope of having a one night stand with a guy who turns out to be her boss, a fender bender involving bad language with a guy who turns out to be her boss, a _____ with a guy who turns out to be her boss, etc. A different kind of oops are the stories in which the young woman literally trips and falls, of course scattering embarrassingly personal items all over an airport or city sidewalk. Sigh. When that happens, I shut the book and delete it from my Kindle. In real life, in a crowded setting, how often has any of us ever seen someone take that kind of pratfall? I'm trying to think of even one time while I lived in NYC. And if it did happen, it happened to an elderly woman or man. Granted, today's young women often wear sky-high heels and platforms, too, but that's no excuse for the overly klutzy characterization of a heroine. Not interested.   

[The Bass Bagwhan]

So, is it tapping into the premise of "you're not the only one whose life sucks?" and getting popularity through being relateable? Of course, "sucks" is a relative  term that ignores the real tragedies constantly surrounding us. Maybe compulsory reading for fans of the genre should be Anne Frank's diaries?

[PJ Post]

I wonder if there is a correlation with social media.

https://dailycal.org/2022/07/17/social-medias-sad-girl-depression-its-aesthetic
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/25/1171773181/social-media-teens-mental-health
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0213-yrbs.html

[LilyBLily]

Nobody's life is perfect. It took me a few decades to learn that. However, when we are young, we are constantly being graded, and we can easily get into a mindset of needing to create what looks like a perfect adult life so we can get another A grade. It takes a while to realize no one is grading us as adults (except possibly our parents), and fairness may exist in school but not in the workplace or in marriages. And so on. Books about people finding cracks in a perfect life do apparently have big appeal. If wallowing in one's own misery brings a better understanding of their and other people's choices, that's good. I don't know if these sad girl books do that.   

 

[Jeff Tanyard]

Self-pity has been around since the dawn of time, and the literary form of it is at least as old as the Book of Job.  This "sad girl" stuff is simply a modern manifestation of a permanent part of the human condition.  There's nothing new under the sun.

If it's truly unusually popular, though, as the article implies, then that could be interpreted by historians as a sign of a decadent and dying society.  Healthy societies are necessarily hopeful ones, not hopeless ones.

[LilyBLily]

Romances many decades ago often had hard-done-by heroines. We still have them in historical romances, usually young women left penniless by improvident fathers. The miserable young woman of today must be a different ilk, since women in our society have many ways to earn their own living or achieve huge success in some field.

Or do they? Why do so many romances begin with the heroine being done out of a deserved promotion or similar well-earned reward? What is going on in our world that makes readers relate to that specific scenario? Up until a decade or so ago, what I saw was that happy heroines all owned their own small businesses. Some of that remains, but the utter rejection of what is mostly likely to be the average world of (usually white-collar office) work for a middle-class woman baffles me. Is this an anti-striver thing?

Then the boyfriend/husband is a betrayer, too. And she loses her apartment, an obvious sign there is to be no return. Are these the same sad girls as those in the article?

Leaving that high-pressure advertising job in New York City to go home and fall in love with the firefighter or cop from their youth isn't just a rural vs. urban story, it's also a big drop in social class from middle-middle (with the hope of attaining upper-middle) to lower-middle class. Unless firefighters suddenly are middle instead of working class. None of these small-town people are likely to get rich or famous. Is that no longer the dream?

Or maybe these are two different groups of unhappy women entirely.

PS: A friend says what I'm really talking about is a particular version of the "fresh start" that often begins a story.

[She-la-te-da]

This kind of crap is why I don't read literary fiction. Bah. Humbug. Bunch of whiney snots who think they're owed a publishing contract. Off with their heads!

Give me some good genre fiction.

[LilyBLily]

Since I seemed to have the wrong idea about the sad girls books, I checked out the Amazon reviews of Ottessa Moshfegh's Year of Rest and Relaxation. So many ways to say "I hated it." The heroine as described by people who gave this book one-star reviews is shallow, depressed, narcissistic, a liar, a druggie, and boring, too. I read the first few pages and was turned off by the heroine's depressive state. There was no overt sadness in those pages, just somebody heading for rock bottom.

Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein fared a bit better, but her heroine also is cited for being pretentious and the story for being boring even though just about every character is unpleasant and lots of bad stuff happens. One person said the book was a "carousel of misery." I found the incessant head-hopping intolerable and ditched it--but not quickly enough to avoid being grossed out by oversharing.

Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times also was panned as boring and pretentious, with an immature heroine and a hero who is a jerk. (High praise compared to the men in Mellors' book, actually.) I found it readable but thin on detail and the heroine was opaque and did come across as very young.

All these books are panned as pretentious and boring. More boring than pretentious, though. Clearly I had the wrong idea about who these sad girls are. Not genre romance heroines by a long shot. All these books had many thousands of ratings on Goodreads (I think two had over 50K), and multiple thousands on Amazon. So...the sad girl authors are laughing all the way to the bank. I stopped there.