Stepping into Bay 17 of Carriageworks, it was clear that the Sydney Writers Festival session ‘Sad Girl? Bad Girl? Mad Girl?’ saw a large percentage of young women in attendance. Mostly in pairs or groups, nearly all were holding several books under their arms — filling almost every seat, ready to hear about the literary world’s most written about enigma: the ‘sad girl’.
In opening the panel, Steph Harmon refers to a 2019 New York Times Article by Leslie Jamison, ‘Cult of the Literary Sad Woman’, which alludes to “the enduring appeal of the afflicted woman — especially the young, beautiful, white afflicted woman: our favorite tragic victim, our repository of rarefied, elegiac sadness.”
This is what Nadine J. Cohen, Madeleine Gray, and Jessie Stephens came together to deconstruct; the depressed yet desirable ‘sad girl’. Within the first few minutes of the talk, the internet’s favourite ‘sad girl’ writers, Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, are mentioned, the popularity of their stories creating communities online that exclusively read, discuss, and aestheticise ‘sad girl’ literature. The panel’s authors do not attempt to disparage this trend, instead Gray highlights how “there is a confidence in younger women writers at the moment to write their own stories,” linking this to the success of authors like Rooney and Moshfegh in reiterating that women’s stories are worth telling on the biggest stages.
Cohen and Stephens claim that whilst the ‘sad girl’ label can be used innocently, there is an air of infantilisation surrounding it. Stephens says the term is inherently “laced with misogyny” and questions why books such as Oliver Twist or Harry Potter aren’t deemed “sad boy literature”, while Cohen calls out how the label can be used as a dismissive tool, minimising women’s suffering to a simple genre or aesthetic.
In discussing her book Everyone and Everything (2023), Cohen further deconstructs the critique that the term is becoming more of an aesthetic. Instead, Cohen highlights how so many of the books people claim fall into this category, including her own, are in fact, works of autofiction. She emphasises that the pervasion of these stories in contemporary literary fiction is perhaps more telling of the general state of women’s mental health rather than a simple aesthetic or fad. Cohen also discusses her own experience with depression and how it affected the story she told, with the writing experience becoming cathartic and healing. Stephens then raises an interesting point — millennial women are the most medicated of any demographic.
Gray’s novel Green Dot (2023), is more light-hearted; her protagonist, Hera, is gliding through life carelessly and chaotically until she begins a passionate affair with a forty-year-old married co-worker. Hera falls particularly well into the ‘bad girl’ category of the session’s title, Gray stating that in writing Green Dot she chose to explore the question of “if you are so aware of your own possibly problematic traits, does that mean you aren’t culpable for acting badly?” Gray says her main character’s detachment derives from a cultural depression part of the cost-of-living crisis. Hera knows she has potential but is exceedingly aware of the societal and economic limitations on her, choosing nonchalance and apathy, and feigning care only when she needs to.
Sex and romance are recurring themes in these ‘sad girl’ texts, and so Stephens links them to a broader interrogation of the sexual revolution, recalling how at the end of three waves of feminism, we still have not achieved the equality we are calling for. She continues by talking about how sex is seen as a ticket to asserting power, discussing the experiences of Adella in her book Something Bad Is Going To Happen (2023) surrounding the “greyness of consent”.
Cohen does not hide how the horrible romantic partners portrayed in her book were not just inspired by, but replications of her real-life exes. The worst of them she chose to give no name: “he didn’t deserve one,” she says, joking later on that “if you don’t want to be written about, don’t date a writer.” In the novel, Cohen’s heroine Yael finds solace from these relationships in the women’s baths, based on McIver’s Ladies Baths in Coogee. Cohen says she found peace in the worst of her depression at the baths, finding that patrons shared similar stories of the safety, nurturing, and healing that it inspired.
Comparatively, Gray’s use of sexuality in Green Dot is used almost as a humorous device. The protagonist exploits her queerness as a claim to philosophical superiority, until she begins to fall for a man, stating that “the things we structurally detest can sometimes be what we want the most.” Hera both desires her older co-worker and is also repulsed by her heterosexual attractions, as she is used to identifying as sapphic.
One of Stephens’ final remarks perfectly sums up the discussion: “Sad girls are only crying because they don’t think it’s appropriate to scream.” Women’s rage at the patriarchy, their personal relationships, and the politics governing society and the literary representation of it are so poignantly concentrated. The easiest outlet is tears, the other is simply to write.
