Sad girl novels like Madeleine Gray's Green Dot are everywhere right now. What's behind this literary trend?

“People say your first novel is the one that you’ve been building up in your mind for your entire life,” Gray says. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin/Zan Wimberley)

She’s in her 20s or 30s, she hates her job, her love life is in disarray and she’s self-absorbed yet beset by self-doubt.

In other words, she’s a hot mess — and she’s the star of the ‘sad girl novel’, a literary trend that has become increasingly popular in recent years.

Sad girl novels — think Normal People by Sally Rooney, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, or Love and Virtue by Diana Reid — feature introspective narratives told from the perspective of young millennial women.

Sad girls aren’t just a literary phenomenon — they also appear on screen (see Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag) and make music (see Lana Del Rey, Maggie Rogers and boygenius).

So, what’s behind the sad girl cultural phenomenon? Why are girls — or white university-educated women in their 20s and 30s — so miserable?

Why so sad, girl?

According to an article published in Elle in 2019, young women’s sorrow stems from reasons as varied as the climate crisis, US politics, the change of season or a break-up.

Pip Finkemeyer is the author of the satirical Sad Girl Novel, which follows the fortunes of Kim Mueller, a 27-year-old aspiring novelist living in Berlin.

“Via the internet, we’re more connected with the suffering going on in the world,” Finkemeyer says.

“We have way too much information about how many awful things are happening at any moment.”

Sad girls are disaffected, disassociated, often depressed, frequently hungover and have a tendency to make bad choices — particularly in the realm of romance.

Hera Stephen, the protagonist of Madeleine Gray’s debut novel Green Dot, is a queer 24-year-old woman who begins a relationship with an older man at work.

The problem? Arthur is married, as the reader learns on the first page.

“The whole book is tracing one woman’s descent into madness as she falls further and further for a man who maybe is not capable of being what she needs him to be,” Gray tells ABC RN’s The Book Show.

Hera is an intelligent young woman with multiple university degrees but she lacks life experience.

“She’s booksmart — she knows lots about theories and ideology, but in terms of the ways of the world, she’s pretty naive because she’s young and she hasn’t had that much social interaction that isn’t within the small remit of her university life,” says Gray, who has a masters degree from the University of Oxford and is currently completing a PhD in literary theory at the University of Manchester.

“[Green Dot] is about her working out that booksmarts will only get you so far.”

Disillusioned with corporate life

Growing up isn’t easy in a world where the traditional markers of adulthood, such as home ownership or parenthood, are increasingly unattainable for people in their 20s.

Sad girls like Hera or Kim feel disillusioned with the traditional trajectory of modern life.

“Millennials grew up being taught there was one route to go down — get married, have children, buy property — and a lot of people are becoming less interested or less able to do those things, so they’re at a standstill while they figure out what they actually are going to do,” Finkemeyer says.

In Green Dot, Hera — reluctantly — lands her first professional role as a comment moderator for a news website.

As far as office jobs go, it is a particularly depressing one.

“You’re basically just deleting racist comments day after day,” Gray says.

The Sisyphean task of trying to halt the tsunami of hate speech that characterises some quarters of the internet leaves Hera “existentially bereft and bored”.

But Hera isn’t anti-work, Gray says.

“What she doesn’t want is a narrative enforced on her for what her life should look like, and she doesn’t want to have to choose an occupation and have that occupation be the trajectory that her life takes.

“She finds that limiting and stifling and depressing.”

Gray — who based the soul-sucking corporate setting of Green Dot on depressing anecdotes she gleaned from her friends — is sympathetic to Hera’s resistance to becoming an office drone.

“I have [also] purposely tried to avoid office life,” she says.

“It bothers me that so many people are forced to go and sit at a desk each day, forever. That seems like a wild concept we’ve accepted as a society.”

The OG sad girl

Of course, sad girls have existed before the 21st century.

“The idea of women being upset and unimpressed with the structures that modulate capitalism — that’s not a new idea,” Gray says.

“It’s just that more and more publishers are publishing books like this because they realise there’s money in it because young women and older women are the biggest readers of fiction.”

Twentieth-century literary sad girls include Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys (author of Wide Sargasso Sea, the famed 1966 prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) and Sylvia Plath, whose 1963 novel The Bell Jar is a common reference point in the current crop of sad girl novels.

The protagonist of Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s But the Girl is working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath, while in Sad Girl Novel, Kim assures the reader she has read The Bell Jar’s Wikipedia page.

The Bell Jar’s protagonist Esther Greenwood, with her dark humour and a voice “dripping with personality”, is the quintessential sad girl, Finkemeyer says.

“[The Bell Jar] is a good example of how something can belong to this genre and still be highly literary.”

‘Depressing and funny’

Finkemeyer never set out to write a sad girl novel. Still, she was aware that “as a white, millennial, privileged young woman, anything you write is likely going to be considered in sad girl territory”.

She first engaged with the genre as a reader of books such as How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a young college graduate who is so disaffected with life that she tries to sleep for a year.

When Finkemeyer started writing her novel, however, she started to view the sad girl narrative through a more critical lens.

She began playing around with the genre’s tropes in her writing: “Things like … a very interesting young woman develops an obsession with a very uninteresting man — that’s something that I was seeing in a lot of books I was reading.”

Finkemeyer may have named her book Sad Girl Novel, but she worries that some use the label to dismiss female writers’ work.

“If these books were written by men, we’d just call them literature — we wouldn’t need to label them,” she says.

Gray is happy to embrace the sad girl tag, particularly for marketing purposes, but also acknowledges the label’s lack of nuance can have “a flattening and potentially reductive” effect.

“It lends itself to certain tropes,” she says.

One is that the sad girl novel lacks humour, an unsurprisingly common misconception given the name.

Gray says that yes, Green Dot is depressing — but it’s also funny.

“[I] warn people that they’ll be laughing, and they’ll be crying, and hopefully they’ll even each other out,” she says.

“I wanted [my book] to be sad, sure, but at the same time, brimming with life and joy and the insanity of living in the modern world, so I’m happy to take sad girl, but I’d also add crazy, wonderful girl.”

What the world thinks of sad girls

The critical response to sad girl culture has been varied.

Writer Audrey Wollen, whose Tumblr musings on Sad Girl Theory kicked off the trend in 2014, argues that women’s melancholy can be viewed as an act of resistance against the patriarchy.

“There’s a long history of girls who have used their own anguish, their own suffering, as tools for resistance and political agency,” she told NYLON in 2015.

“Girls’ sadness isn’t quiet, weak, shameful or dumb: It is active, autonomous and articulate. It’s a way of fighting back.”

Others are critical of the sad girl’s commodification of female suffering and question the lack of diversity in sad girl narratives.

“Why … are so many of these contemporary sad girls and unlikeable women conventionally attractive, young, cisgender and white? Does clinging to a narrative of … victimhood help to conceal structures of power that, in fact, give these women considerable influence and personal agency?” writer Eloise Hendy asked in The Independent.

“Ultimately, the prevalence of the tortured white girl trope in contemporary culture suggests that sadness and suffering is what makes these women valuable, interesting and worthy of attention. That the traumatic confessions of pretty, young white girls are lucrative.”

Finkemeyer believes the rise of the sad girl novel reflects the increased value now placed on young women’s perspectives in popular culture.

“Sadness is more permissible now because of this genre,” she says.

“Once that faucet was opened, the stories started to gush out.”

Green Dot (Allen & Unwin) and Sad Girl Novel (Ultimo Press) are out now.