Why So Sad, Girl Novel?
In defense of the messy protagonist
Have you ever felt like you were falling apart? I know I have—not in a clinical way, but situationally sad. Getting out of bed every day sucks. The house falls into disarray, your finances are a complete shit show, you isolate yourself from your friends and loved ones, and you aren’t dealing with it in productive ways. I have been the shittiest version of myself. I have been unlikeable. Probably we all have. Hopefully, we have all been able to get our acts together.
But this is why I love what has become known as “sad girl” novels. These are books about young women who are probably depressed or maybe experiencing loss and struggling to meet the demands of daily life because of it. The most popular recent examples would include all of Sally Rooney’s books. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation is perhaps the queen of the modern sad girl novels. The book is a hilarious, dark satire, but as a physical object, it also fits the modern sad girl aesthetic on social media. Summer was no longer for hot girls, it was for sad girls. Anyway, I have never been to TikTok, but I’ve been a sad girl. And I love a disaster protagonist. I love a character who is lying to herself and making poor choices.
Although the sad girl is cool right now in publishing, the disaster protagonist has always been a thing. Classic sad girl novels would be Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and even Madame Bovary, which was written by a man. Back in those days, most books were written by men. Protagonists of all genders have been sad and self-destructive. Of course, no story is good unless the protagonist takes some kind of action. But I don’t need anyone to be likable or pull themselves up by their bootstraps or wash their face. I love a story about a character's downfall. I like mess.
What naturally follows every sad girl summer is perhaps the autumn of her criticism. And there are many reasons to criticize the sad girl trend even if books are part of it. For one, it’s obviously not good to read these books as aspirational. Moshfegh addressed this in an interview with Carmen Maria Machado:
“One thing that I have noticed about the new attention to My Year of Rest and Relaxation is that it seems to have this one fan group of, like, people that call themselves sad girls. And that concerns me, just as someone who was a younger woman with depression. When my older sister read it, she said, this should come with a warning label on it. Maybe it should. Because guys, this is a satire, this is not real. And we live in an age where everything is so distorted that I don’t want anyone overdosing on Ambien because they read my book.”
Another reason to criticize the trend is because it’s very white. Lots of the most popular sad girl novels are written by white women about privileged white women. Based on what I’ve seen on the BookTok featured table at the bookstore, I wish the sad girls on TikTok read a little wider. The disaster protagonist exists in books written by and about people of color. These stories are just as interesting and deserve as much attention as the white girls being sad. I want to see all the protagonists navigating their emotional lows, the more foolishly the better.
But aside from protagonists making terrible decisions, what I love about the modern, millennial, sad girl version is the commentary on modern life. The way they can show how life, even when it’s not really all that bad, can still feel so terrible.
A few months ago, I came across a takedown of sad girl novels that criticized this aspect the most. I had read and loved several of the ones cited in the essay, which describes sad girl novels as those about fatalistic, well-read young women who are prone to “expound the writer’s religious, philosophical, or moral theories.” Drawing on the classic 1856 essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” by George Eliot, the critic explains that, “each character is served with a side salad of left-wing evangelism, each scene accompanied by instructions on how to behave progressively, paragraphs are given over to sermons on privilege or unconscious bias.” She quotes Jonathan Franzen on how novels should be entertaining and not moralistic. Maybe I happily eat these side salads because I’m interested in behaving progressively, but I hate it when people tell other people they shouldn’t write or read about certain things, especially when they quote super successful male writers on what a novel should be about. And George Eliot, a woman who lived during a time when it made sense to write under a man’s name so people would take her seriously, maybe isn’t the authority on modern literature. Needless to say, my hackles were raised.
The social critique from several of the novels mentioned in the essay actually felt pretty relevant to me. Assembly by Natasha Brown is about a successful black British woman in a traditionally male field, where her presence is a threat to her coworkers and her bosses are creeps. This is not something I will ever likely experience firsthand, but I didn’t feel like I was being served a moral lesson in the character’s experience. I was exploring a moral complexity through it.
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan, who is Irish, is about money, class, and living in a country where abortion is illegal. The protagonist, Ava, has recently graduated and moved to Hong Kong to work as an English language teacher. In this passage, she explains her motivation:
“I knew I’d do anything for money. Throughout college back in Ireland, I kept a savings account that I charmingly termed ‘abortion fund.’ It had 1,500 euros in it by the end. I knew some women who saved with their friends, and they all helped whoever was unlucky. But I didn’t trust anyone. I got the money together by waitressing, then kept adding to it after I had enough for a procedure in England. I liked watching the balance go up. The richer I got, the harder it would be for anyone to force me to do anything.”
She uses this money to escape and move to another continent, and I can’t think of a better reason for getting out of a place and dating terrible men. Abortion doesn’t show up that often in fiction, and when it does appear, it is usually something that ruins the character’s life. I had never seen it written about like this before. When I first read the book, before the Dobbs decision, I was grateful not to live in such a place. Now having a story about that feels very relevant and worth exploring and reading about.
Class and societal oppression are universal themes revisited throughout literary history. These are things people write about. So why not sad young women?
I read George Eliot’s essay. And I’m sure Middlemarch is great; it’s definitely one of those novels I should have read by now. But her critique of the romance novels of her day, which she claimed were written by self-absorbed wealthy women who had nothing better to do, doesn’t feel like a great parallel to the modern sad girl novel. The passages she cited are poorly written, while most sad girl novels are quite smart and readable. And a big part of her beef was that these silly ladies were getting higher praise in the press than the serious ones like her. (To be honest, those rich lady writers probably paid the newspapers for that praise because that’s how it worked back then.) Eliot believed that the silly lady novelists weren’t educated enough to make an informed argument. She argued that a person with common sense, which the lady novelists lacked, must absorb knowledge that the world is terrible, “instead of being absorbed by it.” This is true. But the implication here and in the criticism of the sad girl novelist is that lady writers shouldn’t let this sort of thing bother us.
Beautiful World, Where Are You?, Sally Rooney’s latest novel, is about capitalism. There’s a moment where one of the protagonists is standing in a supermarket looking at all the options available to her and thinking about all the exploitation of human labor and natural resources that had to occur for these choices to exist. The driving question of the novel is how can a person live in this reality. Capitalism is exploitation and either you’re okay with that or you’re not. But one thing we all are is powerless to really do anything about it. Is this a reason not to write about it? No way. What makes Beautiful World, Where Are You? so good is that Rooney leads her insufferable, immature protagonists to some happiness despite this very modern dilemma. So what if that means dating a dirtbag? That’s what we do. We find our way out of the bleak realities through human relationships.
Life is hard. It sucks finding that out. But we have to live it. We get to. Not so long ago, when women had to marry young and have tons of kids, they were too busy to be sad about the world. Or they were institutionalized. The girls are sad, for good reason. And for me, there is something so stirring about seeing this feeling rendered in art. It’s a very real human experience.