Artist and critic Audrey Wollen used her internet project “Sad Girl Theory” to propagate this idea. The concept of the Sad Girl has a history of white women claiming to use their sadness and fragility to undermine the gendered perception that softness equals weakness.
Later, it was adapted into a 1999 film of the same name starring Winona Ryder as Kaysen and Angelina Jolie as Lisa, a cruel yet charming self-described sociopath. The bestseller explores Kaysen’s suicide attempts, borderline personality disorder diagnosis, and 18-month stay at McLean Hospital, the same place where Sylvia Plath was once treated. The term comes from Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir, Girl, Interrupted. Yeah, of being like, I’m so special and so tortured.” In fact, there’s a term for this kind of symbiotic relationship between reader and Sad Girl archetype: Girl, Interrupted syndrome.ĭasha Nekrasova defined it this way on the Red Scare podcast: “I mean, I’m definitely guilty of having, like, Girl, Interrupted syndrome through my teens and early 20s, at least. “Sad Girl Summer” reading lists feature books about disaffected twentysomethings for those who, like the Sad Girl character, can’t get out of bed despite the warm weather.īut the literary romanticization of this kind of woman isn’t new, even if social media has made it easier to imitate. BookTok creators showcase a stack of Sad Girl books alongside coquettish, aesthetic symbols like lip gloss, pearls, and heart-shaped sunglasses while a Lana Del Rey or Mitski song plays in the background. Most recently, this archetype has been pathologized on BookTok, a subcommunity of booklovers on TikTok. Nothing can cut through the disaffection, the constant desire not to exist. She mostly, if not only, dates unavailable men. She’s either unemployed and broke or working a meaningless job that she’ll lose before the third act. A young white woman, unable to confront the grief, trauma, and/or mental illness that numbs her (think: Esther in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar), makes a radical - albeit self-destructive - change (think: the unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation putting herself to sleep for a year using prescription drugs). During the summer of 2020, a certain kind of literary heroine regained popularity on social media.
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