Women in literary fiction have gone weird, or, at the very least, have begun to engage in behaviour that some might consider strange in an attempt to transgress from the strain of the patriarchy. Weird girl fiction is increasingly becoming a buzzword amongst readers and publishers alike. As listicles of odd women doing off-putting shit are shared and film rights sold, this genre of pseudo-feminist literature looks set to remain in the zeitgeist for years to come. However, does this trend of weird girl protagonists—emotionally vapid and inclined to offend—really engage with the notion of weirdness beyond pick-me middle-class behaviours? And if the goal of such fiction is to disrupt femininity, to challenge our preconceptions with discomfort, is it working?
Tracking Down the Original Weird Girl
It’s hard to say exactly where the weird girl came from before she was the hashtag and marketing weapon she is today, however, her aesthetics point to Tumblr. The glorification of sadness, mental illness, and being not-like-other-girls is shared by both the weird girl and her ancestor, the sad girl—who thrived on internet subcultures in the 2010s. In many ways, the weird girl as a figure of contemporary fiction can be understood as the sad girl grown-up and neurotic, and their cultural heritage is a shared language of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf quotes, beautiful women in tears and disordered eating.
The sad girl rose to prominence as a foil to the girlboss feminism—dating back to the 1990s girl power fad—as a figure that challenged the view that showing suffering undermines the efforts to achieve gender equality. Where she often failed, however, is in acknowledging that economically and socially well-off white women have access to suffering that is frequently inconceivable for the less privileged. Her particular appeal to depressive teenagers also exposed the risk of the sad girl narrative becoming a justification for self-harm. When reading weird girl fiction, the tone of indulging in suffering persists, though in a peppier, more sarcastic mood, and so continues to perpetuate a vision of who can and cannot engage in sadness.
In meditating on the weird girl’s ancestry, it is also worth turning to Southeast Asian feminist-aligned fiction as one of the weird girls’ other influences. Kōno Taeko, Yoko Ogawa, Han Kang are all examples of female writers whose work includes pathologically deviant, emotionally detached women who engage in socially outcasting practices. Their leading women are disturbed by heterosexist child-bearing norms, and their response is to act out in unsettling ways that challenge the reader’s ethics and disgust levels. In many ways, these writers are the exemplars that weird girl fiction aims to replicate in the English-speaking world, women who reject their feminine role so rabidly it veers into grotesque directions, and some homage must be acknowledged, if not by the Western authors themselves, then by the critics of it (myself included).
What’s So Weird About the Weird Girl, Anyway?
Weird girl fiction is still a phrase used sparingly on the internet, but it is increasing in popularity, reflecting both the influx of books published with the specific tone of this non-genre genre, and readers keen to seek out this material. Authors such as Emma Cline, Mona Awad, Eliza Clark, have all been featured on weird girl fiction reading lists, and the veritable queen of the weird girls must be Ottessa Moshfegh.
According to these writers their protagonists must be: middle-class at worst; not beautiful, but sufficiently attractive to not be considered ugly; unhappy; preferably heterosexual; bored with her life; and so disinterested in others opinions of her to the point of engaging in behaviour others think is unusual but not overtly concerning. The weird girl is acting out in ways that would be considered socially inappropriate—she is awkward and unkempt, sometimes psychopathic, sometimes violent, but sufficiently invisible in the world to get away with it. Her behaviour is occasionally unexplainable but is usually later attributed to childhood trauma or a born-this-way apathy, with these troubles being unresolvable even through therapy. In a nutshell, that’s weird girl fiction, but an even shorter version would be as follows: unhinged woman engages in unhinged behaviour.
Being a part of the upper-middle class is the first aforementioned trait of the weird girl. The weird girl fiction world is heavily populated with financially well-off women who seem to be ashamed or, at least bitingly self-aware, of their privilege. And so, we’re confronted with the first complaint against weird girl fiction; that wealthy people have been allowed to be weird since forever. Wealth has always been a cushion for engaging in the type of behaviour that would get plebs institutionalized and this is undoubtedly the case across the spectrum of weird girl narratives. Even suspending disbelief for the magical realism often engaged with in these stories, it is hard to imagine that a working-class woman who began to hallucinate that she was a dog following the birth of her child wouldn’t lose that child to social services; (see Rebecca Yoder’s Nightbitch) or that an intense eating disorder wouldn’t cause any physical repercussions that would lead to possible hospitalization (see Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed).
Weird girls, thanks to their privileged upbringing and social safety nets, rarely face the consequences of their strange behaviour. Take Nightbitch, for example, due to be released as a film starring Amy Adams later this year, wherein postpartum depression is realised by a mother transforming into a dog and engaging in appropriately canine behaviour. What could be a narrative that explores so many aspects of motherhood and the female body is spayed by its anticlimactic climax, wherein the mother in question turns her were-dog behaviour into a piece of performance art for other middle-class mummies. The possibility of transgression is fed back into systems and institutions that validate discrimination. Yoder briefly touches on the prospect that there is something inherently wrong about the treatment of women as mothers, and explores this through a mother experiencing the weirdness of being a dog. But Yoder doesn’t take this to a place that facilitates a substantial investigation of the issues brought up. The neutering of emerging righteous anger is consistent across the range of weird girls in fiction, and whilst it would be foolish to complain that a book isn’t political enough, the impact of these texts is let down by their desire to tie neat bows on their characters’ strangeness. The conclusion of Nightbitch demonstrates this by framing its protagonist’s feral behaviour as a temporary madness rather than a structural issue, with her weirdness appropriated for a brief phase of anger that will never be resolved.
Besides the dissatisfaction of a weird girl going back to her normal life after a stint of madness, nothing having changed in the meantime, a frequent frustration of the weird girl genre is the lack of truly weird behaviour. Really, in the world of the Internet, you have to be doing some absolutely bizarre shit to be considered genuinely odd, and our weird girls aren’t cutting it. Put yourself into a year-long coma? Sleeping Beauty was doing that yonks ago. Stalking women? Men have been doing that forever. Having an eating disorder? Haven’t we all. The limited visions of what could be considered transgressive behaviour reflect a lack of imagination in the writers who, despite their desire to write resistance against patriarchal systems and concern for the oppression of womanhood, simply cannot imagine an outcome that isn’t a validation of the system they are in.
There are few if any acts in popular weird girl texts that engage with real taboo-breaking, which may be due to an overestimation of what qualifies as ‘weird.’ What is valued as weird so often appears to be a display of patheticness that seeks to oppose the 2010s ideal of women as strong and independent. In theory, this isn’t an approach to fiction I oppose – the opposite, I am a pathetic woman stan. However, there is this sense of desire in these texts to engage with broader politics but fall short due to lack of intersectionality. They emphasise on the individual being ‘allowed’ to be pathetic because that is what makes them special. It feels not so much a divergence from choice feminism and more like an extension of it—‘I can choose to be messy, I can choose, because of my privilege, to be pathetic without consequences.’ In novels like Jen Beagin‘s Big Swiss, and Broder’s Milk Fed, there is a distinct sense of looking down on other women, a judgmentalness that pervades their protagonists’ internal dialogues. In these queer variants of the weird girl, even their female lovers are objectified, rendered pathetic, in ways that feel like regressions rather than transgressions.
Milk Fed is a classic example of the problems of weird girl fiction and its insidious white feminism, alongside the Moshfegh staple A Year of Rest and Relaxation. In both, their protagonists spiral without a support system to recognise their struggles, and the texts indulge in the grotesque of their respective experiences of mental illness. However, in this grotesque sits an indulgence—it feels neither radical nor unique to indulge and aestheticise self-harming behaviours. These complaints are also exactly why the sad girl lacks the same online traction she did in the 2010s: glorifying your suffering is now more broadly recognised as feeding into systems of oppression, and enabling a competitiveness that is unproductive. In many ways, these texts feel like such a deep product of female self-hatred that thrived in the 1990s, that it is almost anachronistic for them to exist in our present cultural approaches to gender.
Rather than leave you high, dry and weird-girl deprived, I have some suggestions. You want actual transgression? Try Sayaka Murata, Agustina Bazterrica, Alison Rumfitt—writers exploring experiences of gender, sexuality, and race in ways that will creep you out, make you uncomfortable, leaving you feeling well and truly weirded out. Because weird girl fiction isn’t truly weird, more often than not a knee-jerk reaction to the clean feminist aesthetics of recent decades, one that fails to find its footing amongst contemporary gender politics.