![]() The book attracted new fans during the early part of the pandemic, when the desire to sleep through life was never more appealing. The novel follows a beautiful, wealthy Ivy League graduate who goes into a drug-induced hibernation for a full year so she no longer has to deal with her grief. Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a stalwart of the Sad Girl reading list. And as a result, the flattening portrayal and romanticization of those characters ignores the racism sometimes present in these narratives. But the way we market books to readers has an effect on how those stories exist within our cultural consciousness. This means creators usually opt for attention-grabbing statement videos rather than nuanced takes. These creators, who make videos that last no longer than 15 seconds and use trending audio sounds, see the algorithm heavily push such content. The recurrence of the Sad Girl archetype on TikTok and elsewhere has happened in part because these platforms encourage content creators to discuss books in a way that’ll attract the largest audience. ![]() ![]() But no part of the Sad Girl ideology accounts for how white women weaponize those same tears against marginalized communities. She told Dazed magazine in 2015 that people typically see and discuss political protest through a masculine lens and that “this limited spectrum of activism excludes a whole history of girls who have used their sorrow and their self-destruction to disrupt systems of domination.” She cites Plath and Lana Del Rey as influences on her work and alludes to a history of women turning their tears into liberation. She posted photos of herself crying or in vulnerable positions to Instagram and paired them with captions such as “planning the revolution 101.” For Wollen, this was an act of political resistance. Artist and critic Audrey Wollen used her internet project “Sad Girl Theory” to propagate this idea. The concept of the Sad Girl has a history of white women claiming to use their sadness and fragility to undermine the gendered perception that softness equals weakness. Later, it was adapted into a 1999 film of the same name starring Winona Ryder as Kaysen and Angelina Jolie as Lisa, a cruel yet charming self-described sociopath. The bestseller explores Kaysen’s suicide attempts, borderline personality disorder diagnosis, and 18-month stay at McLean Hospital, the same place where Sylvia Plath was once treated. The term comes from Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir, Girl, Interrupted. Yeah, of being like, I’m so special and so tortured.” In fact, there’s a term for this kind of symbiotic relationship between reader and Sad Girl archetype: Girl, Interrupted syndrome.ĭasha Nekrasova defined it this way on the Red Scare podcast: “I mean, I’m definitely guilty of having, like, Girl, Interrupted syndrome through my teens and early 20s, at least. “Sad Girl Summer” reading lists feature books about disaffected twentysomethings for those who, like the Sad Girl character, can’t get out of bed despite the warm weather.īut the literary romanticization of this kind of woman isn’t new, even if social media has made it easier to imitate. BookTok creators showcase a stack of Sad Girl books alongside coquettish, aesthetic symbols like lip gloss, pearls, and heart-shaped sunglasses while a Lana Del Rey or Mitski song plays in the background. Most recently, this archetype has been pathologized on BookTok, a subcommunity of booklovers on TikTok. Nothing can cut through the disaffection, the constant desire not to exist. She mostly, if not only, dates unavailable men. She’s either unemployed and broke or working a meaningless job that she’ll lose before the third act. A young white woman, unable to confront the grief, trauma, and/or mental illness that numbs her (think: Esther in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar), makes a radical - albeit self-destructive - change (think: the unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation putting herself to sleep for a year using prescription drugs). During the summer of 2020, a certain kind of literary heroine regained popularity on social media.
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