In her rise to popularity since the publishing of her first novel Conversations with Friends in 2017, Sally Rooney has become one of the poster examples as a writer of the so-called “literary sad girl”. The term “sad girl” refers to the nebulous category of literature often attached to writers, dominating headlines to bookshop sections to Spotify playlists to quizzes proclaiming the question “which literary sad girl are you?”. The publication of her most recent novel Intermezzo has returned her to the literary spotlight and yet, though the book at its centre explores the complexity of adult relationships, its placing in the Goodreads category of “sad girl september” before it even came out is suggestive of a problem with the label as something entirely arbitrary.
There is value in relating to art, but the title exists away from simply creating a space where women can have their problems heard. The issue with the continuing categorization of art into “sad girl literature” is at worst a tool of misogyny, and at best entirely a myth. Sally Rooney herself, in a recent interview about Intermezzo, stated “I don’t think my books are that sad, are they?”. In a tone described as “perplexed”, she continues “I find my books quite optimistic about the human condition and about relationships.” Oftentimes the media “lumped into this category”’, as put by singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, isn’t simply sad. Dacus herself, who has time and time again been placed into the “sad girl” category, has stated “I don’t write just sad music. I think most of my music isn’t sad”.
What Dacus is pinpointing here is the confusion associated with the one-dimensional labelling of often varied emotions. Her music is angry, frustrated, intimate, and often heartwarming; as is the works of many women who get affiliated with the label, despite having wildly different intentions in their art. The irony of the “sad girl” trope as it exists across all forms of media is that it has been continually resisted by the female artists it is assigned to. Singer-songwriter Mitski has stated “the sad girl thing was reductive and tired like five, ten years ago and still is today”. Mitski, who has written about her racialised experiences as a Japanese woman in her music, has expressed frustration with the colloquial referral of her music as “sad”.
On a similar vein Rooney has spoken about the Marxist themes at the centre of her novels; and the themes of loneliness that run through her work and earn her a place in the sad girl category she has spoken about being part of her attempt to explore isolation as a result of class division. The category has become simply another way to misunderstand the complexity of women’s emotions and the range of experiences that inspire and are produced from their work. The emotions of these women are flattened and simultaneously reduced to something that is viewed as desirable; when in reality, this is often a misunderstanding. Author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation Ottessa Moshfegh, whose protagonists have often fallen into this category, has also spoken out in concern for those who label themselves “sad girls” as fans of her writing, pointing out that her characters are often written as satirical. “I don’t want anyone overdosing on Ambien because they read my book”.
New York Times critic Dwight Garner, in a review of Intermezzo, writes “Rooney’s writing about love hits as hard as it does because she is especially adept at evoking loneliness for which love is a salve”. The intensity of emotions that often lends itself to art being categorised this way comes from a place that invoke hope; Rooney writes about the grief within relationships that invoke a wider message about the transcendence of love. There appears to be something uniquely patronising in reducing the work of women who have written out of experiences of mental illness, grief and structural oppression and placing in the flimsy label of “sad”, and even more so when it refers to something that is never truly concerned with sadness in the first place.
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