I’ve spent much of this summer running away from my responsibilities by travelling abroad on other people’s coattails, only to have those responsibilities follow me, clinging to my ankle or my hair. One of the great benefits of travel is the chance to catch up on reading, and I usually find myself travelling with half a suitcase full of paperbacks and at least one sneaky, illicit hardback. I used to treat holiday books as escapism, filling my suitcase with genre fiction and YA romance designed to transport me away from the anxieties and mundanities of my everyday life. Tidying out the bookshelves in my childhood room at the end of August was a little like tunnelling through layers of prehistoric strata, from the twentieth-century history books I ploughed through as an eighteen year old with a dubious and since abandoned ambition to political science, to the fantasy tomes my family refer to as ‘cloak and stick books’, and the saccharine piles of John Green and his imitators.
The most recent layer is less escapist; books about women in their twenties or perhaps older, usually unemployed or barely employable, in an urban setting, bearing both some sort of nebulous childhood trauma and the weight of an uncertain future. Women experiencing ennui, is how I tend to refer to these novels, and they make the perfect summer reading whether you identify with them or not. Because ennui is a muggy, cloying sort of boredom, an awareness that something is wrong combined with an inability – or unwillingness – to do anything about it. It’s a hot feeling, it clings around your ears like sunstroke.
I know this sort of book has come under fire recently, whether as ‘sad girl literature’ or ‘cool girl novels’. But I don’t think the criticisms are sound, nor do they label a coherent genre, instead choosing to lump together a selection of different works by young female authors, which are literary but not Literary (read: male). If there’s a trend or a trope that’s currently popular, it’s probably for a reason, speaking to the real experiences and emotions of young women. I wrote about this in my very first Substack post, on the Waif Girl trend. The six books I’ve selected to discuss here are all examples of sad / bad / mad girl literature, but they all differ in style, plot, and quality. They can’t be homogenised or reduced to a single theme or approach, save for the gender and age of their protagonists, and perhaps a hint of wry world-weariness that rather comes with the territory.
Write what you know, people will tell you. They’re less likely to say read what you know, but I suppose that’s what I’m doing. That being said, I think there’s something to find here whether you’re a sad / bad / mad girl or not.
Contains very mild spoilers. Obviously.
Sad / Bad / Mad Girls
Haunted Houses - Lynn Tillman
Sometimes fate leads you to a book — the Year Two reading comprehension that lead me to The Hobbit, for example, or the enticing cover of my mum’s copy of A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Haunted Houses by Lynn Tillman was a bit like that. A review of Tillman’s most recent novel came out in the LRB in July, and I added her work to my embarrassingly lengthy Notes app ‘to be read’ list, only to find that I’d already done so. And then, reviewing the selection of books I’d purchased for the summer, I found a copy of Haunted Houses sitting right on the top. Following three women from childhood to young adulthood, Haunted Houses is a thesis in beautiful prose, defending Freud’s insight that one’s childhood and family sagas can never truly be repressed.
Haunted Houses could be – and has been – readily lumped in with today’s ‘sad girl literature’. Grace, Emily, and Jane are damaged young women who struggle with daddy issues, overbearing mothers, body image, food, sex and relationships, and assault. But there’s an unexpected depth to the novel, grounded in its twentieth century urban setting. I found myself thinking of it as a state of the nation novel, with a rare and uniquely female lens. Haunted Houses is a book about growing up under the shadow of trauma, your own and your parents’ and your nation’s, but the questions it poses are never really answered, perhaps because there were no answers to find – not in 1987, when it was first published, nor today, when it has been reprinted for a new audience. What does it mean to grow up a girl, to become a woman? What compromises do you make? What risks do you take? Can you ever really leave yourself behind?
Haunted Houses ends abruptly, and I wanted more. But then again, the same could be said about the girlhood of its three protagonists, who grow up slowly, and then in the final pages, all at once.
Watching Women and Girls - Danielle Pender
I wanted so badly to enjoy Watching Women and Girls, Danielle Pender’s collection of twelve short stories which all ask one question — ‘When you look at a woman, who do you see?’. I didn’t exactly dislike the collection, as it’s refreshing to see this sort of work in a British rather than North American setting, and I found at least a few of Pender’s characters compelling (the three sisters who collide at a wedding could have carried a far longer piece), but my enjoyment was purely surface level. Reading this collection concurrently with the luminous, unsettling Haunted Houses, the contrast couldn’t have been sharper.
Sure, Watching Women and Girls is a perceptive portrait of modern female life — twenty-somethings working in marketing, exhausted mum-and-baby groups gathering in Pret — yet this is perhaps why I found it boring. The women in Pender’s stories are real, almost too real, and whilst they make for a good read when you’re waiting for the Tube, they don’t stick with you beyond that. The language is clear, readable, but lacking in depth or spark, a bit like a cheap rosé on a warm day. Trite and un-compelling, this is fiction for people who like a shiny cover in their Instagram and a feminist statement in the caption.
Hot Milk - Deborah Levy
Oh, Deborah Levy, I love you. And possibly I hate you just a little bit too. Because after finishing Hot Milk, albeit several years later than everyone else in the world (it was shortlisted for the Booker in 2016), I felt I could never read another book again. Ever. I felt destroyed, distraught. I felt, like the novel’s heroine, Sofia, as if ‘the tip of the arrow is aimed at my heart’.
Sofia is twenty-five, an anthropologist who abandoned her PhD to support her difficult, ailing mother, Rose, who suffers from a mysterious set of illnesses which no doctor can seem to cure. Unlike Sofia’s estranged father, who has had a religious conversion and acquired a far younger wife, Rose has ‘no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.’ Sofia sees her mother as a case study, and it is her desire to understand her as much as help her that leads the pair to the experimental clinic of Doctor Gomez in the remote deserts of Spain. Staying in a run-down rental on the beach, Sofia’s life collides with the conflicts and love affairs of the locals and the staff at the clinic, as well as her demanding mother’s desperate desires — for the right kind of water, for a bling tourist watch, for her body and her life back. Her relationships and her sense of reality begin to unravel under the desert heat as the novel spirals to a devastating climax. Surreal, dazzling, unusually poetic, Hot Milk is a book that cuts to the bone. I feel blessed to have read it. I wish I had the chance to read it over, for the first time, again.
A fair warning to all sad etc girls. There are lines in this book you will read once and realise immediately you will never escape again. For example: My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.
Bunny & All’s Well - Mona Awad
Given that I read two of her books in the space of a month, you can probably guess how I feel about Mona Awad. This is perfect holiday reading for those who went through a ‘not like the other girls’ phase in high school, and who have un-ironically uttered the phrase ‘sad girl summer ‘ at least once. Yet not only is she bang on trend, Mona Awad can write.
Bunny has probably already caught your eye, its bright pink cover beckoning invitingly from the Waterstones bestsellers table. It’s a trippy, pastel-hued hallucination which follows Samantha Mackey, the outsider on her prestigious creative writing course, and her course mates, a group of gushingly twee rich girls who refer to each other as ‘Bunny’. Bunny is hilarious, disturbing, tongue in cheek, with a twist that will rip your heart out. That being said, the problem was that I kind of…liked the Bunnies. In fact, I sort of wanted to be a Bunny. Your villains are a clique of super rich girls with an endless supply of Summer-in-the-Hamptons-esque attire, cream cheese frosted cupcakes, and feminist literature, who might also be necromantic witches, and we’re not supposed to feel even the slightest bit envious? The Bunnies might be bitches, but they’re also kind of cool. Maybe this is my reading comprehension failing me in the face of simple-minded materialistic jealousy, but it did mean I couldn’t get fully on side with Samantha, whose bitterness makes her compelling but no more interesting than her sworn enemies.
Awad writes bitterness well, and it is Miranda, the bitter, jaded lead in her most recent novel, All’s Well, who really drives the story forwards. Or rather, directs it. A dark comedy about a college theatre professor desperate to relive the glory days of her acting career, which was cut short by a serious accident, through her bratty and recalcitrant students, All’s Well spoke to the theatre kid and poorly repressed Shakespeare nerd still lurking within me. If you shudder at the thought of uttering the M-word onstage, this one’s for you. But then again, if you don’t want to dredge up the memories of enthusiastic group warm ups or last minute set changes…maybe avoid it.
As in Bunny, Awad joins sharp social commentary to spiralling surrealism. I loved reading Miranda’s encounters with the three mysterious businessmen who offer to invest in her theatre program — and Miranda her self. Awad doesn’t let conventional narrative or genre limit her storytelling. That being said, I’d be interested to know the views of other chronically ill or disabled women on Miranda’s ending. It made sense, story wise, but I wasn’t sure how well it sat with me.
Penance - Eliza Clark
Finally, a slightly different read, one which falls securely into the ‘bad girls’ part of my cheesy subtitle. Eliza Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, broke my brain. I finished it feeling disgusted and overwhelmed, like I wanted to cling on for dear life whilst tossing the book to the depths of my wardrobe, like something dirty. It was one of those rare books which made me think – wow, I didn’t know literature could do this.
In her second novel Penance, Clark has done it again. Penance tells the story of the gruesome murder of a teenage girl by her classmates on the eve of the Brexit vote. A little like Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, which came out in 2017, Penance is told in the form of interviews, narratives, and media excerpts compiled by a disgraced middle aged journalist, Alec Carelli. The crime at the centre of Penance is entirely fictional, but the setting is vivid and evocative of small town Britain on the eve of the EU Referendum. It’s hard to tell whether Penance’s depiction of teenage girlhood in the 2010s or the senseless violence that seethes through it is more stomach churning — some of the texts and Tumblr posts could have fallen straight off my battered old iPhone 5.
Penance is made more complex by its layered voices — Carelli is as unreliable a narrator as the teenage girls who killed their classmate. I’ve always hated the true crime industry, with its voyeuristic, pawing attitude, dubious treatment of victims and their families, and all-male podcasts in which descriptions of young women’s mutilated bodies are interspersed with adverts for Viagra or mattresses. Clark skewers this popular type of true crime, but also broadens her sights to include the press, crime writers, and horror fandoms online, examining the way in which different forms of media help to shape our preoccupations, personalities, and actions. Nothing is ever clear or simple, black or white. There are no ‘good guys’ in Clark’s world. It’s safe to say that I wait with bated breath — and some trepidation — to see what she writes next.
What are you reading? What do you think of the sad/ mad/ bad girl book trend — and the whole ‘girlhood’ thing in general? (My view: I like the books but 2016 did hot takes on girlhood way better. Lessons learnt from Penance not withstanding). Let me know in the comments if you fancy — I’d really like to make this blog less impersonal and more of a space for discussion and debate of all sorts.