It is a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how inventive and dextrous a writer may be, she’s always at the mercy of a societal impulse to pigeonhole authors who aren’t men into trite subcategories (which shouldn’t be confused for genres).
In recent years, novels with a certain set of signifiers—young, chaotic female narrators navigating wealthy echelons, which they may or may not already belong to; an older lover or a series of lovers; an undercurrent of dread in an idyllic beach setting—have been lumped together in an amorphous blob deemed “Hot Sad Girl” books by other readers who’ve clocked the trend.
The flippantly titled categorization makes sense on the most basic level. But it also flattens literary achievements, however flawed, like My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Luster by Raven Leilani, Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados, and this year’s current summer obsession, The Guest by Emma Cline, into products of an assembly line.
ADVERTISEMENT
No longer independent literary creations, in the aggregate, “Hot Sad Girl” books sound frivolous and dismissible, as though writing a novel were as easy as following a formula: Insert narrator’s drug-induced meltdown in a party dress here.
The label minimizes the talent of the authors who crafted these narratives. Not only that, but what’s most insidious is that “Hot Sad Girl” books aren’t labeled thusly by readers because of their content, but because they were written by women. This siloing is likely done semi-unconsciously. Still, men have been writing stories about young, beautiful women in psychic turmoil for as long as there have been stories, and no one would dream of reducing Dostoevsky’s Anna Karenina heroine to a Hot Sad Girlie of the Summer; at least not earnestly. The condescension of the “Hot Sad Girl” book label, however, is unfortunately deadly serious.
So how did we get here? My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a bona fide cultural reset, set the tone for what was to come upon its release in 2018. The narrator of Moshfegh’s novel is a gorgeous, young white woman with significant funds at her disposal and a desire to sleep a year of her life away. As dark as the story was, you couldn’t help but come away thinking, “She’s got a point.”
@mina.undercova Absolutely. #booktok #books #sadgirlbooks #hotgirlbook #reading #myyearofrestandrelaxation #ottessamoshfegh ♬ original sound - Jacob Miller
The allure of Moshfegh’s antiheroine was so powerful that her essence soon started to appear elsewhere on the literary scene. Tolentino’s popular essay collection Trick Mirror was published the following year, containing shades of the exhaustion with contemporary life that oozed from Rest and Relaxation, but maintaining a much peppier and analytical tone.
Like the main character in The Guest—the bright green novel you’ve probably spotted on everyone’s beach towels this summer—Tolentino describes experiencing deep ennui in a beach setting; when she was 16, she spent a month filming a reality TV show called Girls vs. Boys in Puerto Rico, an experience she documents in Trick Mirror.
The point, though, is that these are ultimately just petty similarities. Edie, the main character of Luster, is also a chaotic young woman; the party girls of Happy Hour, too, are chaotic young women. But anyone with a truly discerning eye could tell you that all these stories are very different. Edie, ideologically tortured, gets sucked into a domestic vortex of doom with her older lover. The women of Happy Hour just want to have fun. The narrator of The Guest is a con artist on a hellish mission to last the week in Long Island, despite having nowhere to stay.
What’s most interesting about The Guest is that it’s ultimately a disappointment. You can feel Cline straining to maintain breakneck momentum while cramming in as many of-the-moment setting details as possible before the story simply stops, with its many loose ends left dangling in the breeze. But Cline is a weird and excellent author who was clearly aiming for broad commercial appeal with The Guest, and she succeeded in that sense. The book is a bestseller, probably because right now, people love reading brisk novels about young women on the edge of nervous breakdowns: your “Hot Sad Girl” books.
And yet, one yearns for a cultural body politic that’s not so eager to sand down the accomplishments of uniquely gifted female writers who are scraping and scraping until their efforts fit neatly within the confines of an Instagram caption. Maybe next summer.
