In recent years, the Internet and bestseller lists alike have been awash with a particular kind of book marketed towards young women: the “sad girl novel.” These novels are heavy on characterisation and light on plot, typically follow an anxious young woman as she struggles through life.
On paper I should be the ideal candidate for this genre, but there’s something about it which has come to frustrate me. The more I read, the more I find myself questioning how these protagonists and their physical bodies are described.
For example, in Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Marianne has “long thin hands” and “small and triangular” breasts. In Conversations with Friends, Frances describes herself as looking “plain” yet “so extremely thin as to look interesting.” I find this comment particularly fascinating in its implication that thinness is not the standard for beauty and aesthetic interest in contemporary Western culture.
Despite all of Rooney’s merits, she has yet to write a female character whose body is not categorically described as thin. And as someone whose body can’t be described in such a way, this is something I’ve noticed with escalating discomfort.
It’s not just Rooney, of course. In what is perhaps the original sad girl novel, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, our narrator is “skinny as a boy.” In The Pisces by Melissa Broder, the protagonist has “always had a small frame and never gained weight easily.” Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen describes herself as being “so thin that my hips jutted out awkwardly,” whilst the unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation obsessively reminds us that she is “blond and thin and pretty.”
Moshfegh might be an extraordinary case. Her unabashed and well-chronicled hatred of fat people has been discussed by literary critics such as Andrea Long Chu in Vulture, who wisely observes that Moshfegh only writes about the “emphatically, existentially thin.” Yet Moshfegh is not alone in her blindness on this subject.
Many of the best writers of our era seem utterly incapable of writing female characters who are not some combination of willowy, petite, or dainty. At a certain point, these characterisations feel repetitive and boring; I would go so far as to call them lazy. They reinforce the idea that the only stories worth telling are those belonging to women with a specific body type.
It’s hard not to read these descriptions of smart and interesting female characters and feel excluded, as though I haven’t been invited to the party because of the size I wear. Where is the Normal People for the fat girl? Can we not have a Connell Waldron of our own? As it currently stands, our lives exist elsewhere, in a place these talented writers refuse to go.
I can only hope that in time this might change; that authors think more critically about how they describe their characters and why. Above all, I hope “sad girl literature” can come to actually represent the bodies of the women it purports to be written for. We would all be better for it.
“The Three Graces” by lluisribesmateᥩ is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0