here are some essays about women in fiction

ok, couple weeks back i asked instagram if they remembered this one specific essay about unlikeable female protagonists – sad bad girls who were kinda gross and horrible, but beautiful – so they could get away with being despicable.

i was thinking about otessa moshfegh’s my year of rest and relaxation, but i think this was an essay in a proper highbrow literary magazine (small serif font, earthy tone website background, one image at the top of the article, run on sentences and academic bluster). literary criticism! analysis of fiction in a way that zooooooms all the way out and looks at this kind of thing on a macro scale – like what does this say about The Culture.

i was asking with an ulterior motive, with sunday’s text (a review of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan) and the unreliable and disagreeable and potentially toxic femininity narrator in mind. i was wondering if this fictional imaginary essay had something to say that would be a handy lil add on background research to that review. in the end, i don’t think i found it and i don’t think it was relevant anyway – more going on in i’m a fan than just Bad Vibes Girly.

But !! i asked and instagram fuckin answered – i got soooo many replies, a lot of them sending over the same few articles. but i got the MOST replies asking if i could share the link once i found it. i am obvs v sad to report that i don’t think i ever found the article. think i dreamed it or misremembered it sooo severely i’m now thinking of something else entirely. i think actually that i’m partially getting it all mixed up with that merve emre feature? totally different thing. i’ve imagined it. but i’ll share the links to texts that i did find – and also some Thoughts!

• this article, from the independent, about the literary waif girl, sally rooney protagonists and their emotional constipation, sad suffering and also completely inexplicable mousy allure. this one is kinda bitchy lmao – or at least it handles the subject with disdain.

• ayesha siddiqi & Charlie Markbreiter talk about milennial taste and the way it leaks into fiction – the rest of these are all articles like essays,analysis, packaged thought. this one was interesting bc it was two people chatting? found that interesting and noteworthy. as a side note, i think ayesha siddiqi is so interesting and psychic. finger on the thing, always on the thing, how is it possible to be correct ALL THE TIME?

• wonderful olivia sudjic on what makes a millennial novel – for the guardian » similar to ayesha siddiqi’s line of enquiry above, but this one is v tight even tho it’s a longread. it is tidy, smooth, lots of interesting thoughts about rooney and moshfegh but also plenty of other writers who i hadn’t thought of in relation to this !!

• this article in another gaze about the archetypical young millennial woman – mostly fleabag and how all 20-30 something white women just kinda hate themselves? idk, i thought it was kinda interesting to draw a circle around sally rooney, fleabag and a couple of other cultural crumbs like cat person, girls. to read about this archetype as a thing specific to white women was interesting most of all.

• this article for the new statesman, about the cool girl novelist was interesting bc actually it zoomed out of the frame of Just the Fiction Itself and took a look at the identity of the writers (in a more blatant wat than the Another Gaze article, which did that v gently). like, this is a Kind of Fiction written by a Kind of Woman. i haven’t actually read this in full yet bc i can’t get past the new statesman paywall on my phone – but i can on my laptop for some reason? so tbc it’ll be my evening reading if i can be arsed to schlep my laptop home from the office. – if i remember rightly, i think this one was potentially bitchy too? not sure, will confirm once read.

• i think this article on medium is a response to the new statesman article above, so i haven’t read this either – was saving it for after i’d read NS

• about fiction where young women are in relationships with older men who treat them badly. v lana del rey energy – that kinda cultural current – again, haven’t read bc of the paywall, even tho all i have to do is register I DON’T WANA!!!

• buzzfeed, about smart women, feminism under late stage capitalism and how we’re all losing our minds a bit – this one is kinda both on and off piste for what i’m looking for in cultural analysis terms. it’s all very american for my taste, east coast sarcastic new york cool girl in a way i just find irrelevant to what i’m after (and the red scare podcast host’s ed twitter mention was a kind of jumpscare) but, i get why someone sent this – it’s weirdly close, but looking the other way if ykwim? buzzfeed, rip.

• this guardian article by sarah manavis – who, i j rly enjoy her writing!– about a future tense beyond sad girl lit v interesting bc it looks to ways that this thing is being phased out or pushed past, it as a stepping stone to something new and more unstable perhaps? idk! it actually mentions i’ma fan, but also !! eliza clark & penance, which i rly rly enjoyed! i still haven’t read boy parts – this is my reminder to do so asap. i LOVE U eliza clark and i want to ask you questions in the smoking area of a weatherspoons. idk why, but that’s kida what a i rly rly want after reading this article.

• this article about the unlikable female protagonist is the closest to what i was looking for, but i’ve never seen or heard of this website before in my life, so it can’t be!!! but it hits the mark i think

ok, the end of the list !! whew.

so my thoughts are: i think it’s absolutely objectively bonkers that so many articles have been published about the Types of Woman in literature, reducing these many different books down into trends, tropes or trajectories. i think it’s mad bc almost all these things were written by women and it makes me feel itchy, culturally speaking, that these things are not just read as THINGS but as THINGS THAT SIGNIFY THINGS, FOR THE CULTURE. i mean, it’s also true that they’re not wrong. there is definitely a trend or a commonality to this kind of fiction.

i mean, yeah. some of these articles are interested in the wider trend itself. but some are hyper focused on female writer and what their writing very tightly means. n i just think it’s weird that so many articles have been written about what sally rooney MEANS! not just what her books say about society, what her work says in relation to the canon, but what SALLY ROONEY signifies SPECIFICALLY. if i was sally rooney i’d crawl into a hole and never write, speak, or even think a word ever again. not to shame anyone for thinking about all this or consuming this kinda content, this is all fair game. but it’s just.

it’s j telling that we’re living in an era where i think more women are being published and publishing like bigggg bestselling culture defining books. like, the Lady-Writer is for sure On Top. books are just girly things now. but still there’s this cultural or societal macro chronic backdrop of misogyny just leering there under the surface of literary thought. EVEN THO THESE ARTICLES ARE MOSTLY WRITTEN BY WOMEN. i don’t think the journos themselves are guilty of misogyny, i j wonder what all these thinkpieces en mass actually do, like their affect.

as a writer who is also kinda a woman, mostly a woman, more a woman that anything else – ish. idk! it just makes me feel itchy about the way our book is going to be read bc honestly the mere fact of being perceived as WOMAN makes me wana leap out my skin. i don’t wana be a type, even tho i know type is something that is designated to you – you don’t get to opt in or out of that, you don’t control it, it’s j kind assigned as a result of wider movements. i know nothing original exists ever, these works all speak about the wider world and culture and the economy and society adn everything – and that' what this analysis is doing – figuring all that out.

i j think – did anyone say this when men were writing about fucking jack reacher novels? has anyone writeen about the dan-brownification of literary tastes, drawing a wide circle around him and like,… james patterson, those jack reacher novels, read it all up against historical fiction. i know there’s that article about dad-non-fiction-hardbacks or like waterstones dads.. , . i’m just a girl! and i feel weird about people telling me about the things i like and what they mean! i also think there’s a density to this kinda analysis that feels overwhelming. that’s all!!!!

ok, there are ur links! i’ll leave u with this video esay by my favourite cultural thinker, mina le, about the hot-girlification of reading