The Rise of Weird Girl Lit
By: Alivia Stonier
Edited by: Caelin Sullivan
Complex, strange, and at times filled with rage,“Weird Girl Lit” captures the experiences of women that have been disillusioned with current reality.
With stories that range from women losing a year of life, to elective sleep using pills, to a competitive swimmer fixated on becoming a mermaid, this genre allows for complex stories that diverge from traditional depictions of womanhood.
Weird Girl Lit captures the darker edges of how women are socialized, especially in a society that values constant output and pressure to build ourselves in any facet possible, whether it be our beauty and strict standards to a fruitful career, while also feeling pressure to please those we’re surrounded by.
Whether it be an obsession with perfection and beauty or having to be a pillar of support for others even in your own unravelling, the subgenre spits out these expectations and leaves you to examine the bones where these norms originated.
The Origin
You may wonder, where did this subgenre originate? And why has it gained so much traction? Tracing back to 2020, the cultural uptick is widely attributed to the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite being more reflective of current culture, this more modern popularization pulls from the roots of gothic literature.
For many people, the pandemic was a time of mental suffocation. Between the isolation of quarantining, elevated stress levels when managing large households, and the fear that plagued society about the future of health and being able to safely return to routine, people began to crave media that wasn’t afraid to project this uncertainty back to them in other ways on the page.
For many, the idea of having to isolate was a far-off extreme that seemed unlikely, with people clinging to an original time period of a two-week shutdown only to have those hopes ripped away. It became a time that felt like fiction. The constraints of what can be considered realistic to experience as a result were shifting in real time.
According to research by Boston College and the World Health Organization, the prevalence of anxiety and depression rose by an estimated 25% in the first year of the pandemic alone. In the United States, symptoms of depression and anxiety among adults were reported at rates nearly six times higher than 2019 levels during the height of the pandemic.
Most notably, young adults aged 18 to 29 were among the hardest hit, with up to 65% reporting symptoms of anxiety and 61% reporting depression by November 2020.
It's with this same age group that the “weird girl" typically aligns herself. Popular authors in the genre include women like Ottessa Moshfegh, Jade Song, Lucy Rose, Mona Awad, and Sarah Rose Etter. This only scratches the surface on those adding their voices and perspectives in this pool.
Authors from far before this contemporary era, however, are the reason that it is able to exist today, with prominent voices including Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, and Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House.
It is no coincidence that in the film industry, reimaginings of these very stories are also coming alive with more media shining a light on their gothic twists to storytelling.
Penguin Books put together a "Weird Girls" series featuring authors like Angela Carter and Yoko Ogawa, highlighting earlier, influential, and unconventional fiction that predates the modern rise of the trend.
Despite some readers’ skepticism, for fans of the genre, Weird Girl Lit allows for a diversion from expectations of what you may typically see across media, with women fitting more digestible roles or linear arcs in the exploration of their character.
Especially in today's culture, where attention spans are rapidly on the decline, it has become an inherent part of media to use the absurd and experimental to keep the audience's attention. This mode of expression has only continued to become more prevalent as the rise of AI is rapidly expanding the technological landscape.
Popularity in Weird Girl Lit went along with film releases that mirrored desire for the strange, with popular films such as Saltburn, which features nefarious behavior with graves and bathtubs. This also includes films like Everything Everywhere All at Once, which captures complex family dynamics through images like bagels and turning into rocks.
Gone is the need for linear storytelling that holds the consumer's hand; instead, the shock of the journey is something that can keep them along for the ride. But novels in particular allow for plot points that are difficult to execute on screen to become even more believable when written out on the page.
Current Relevance
In a world where the very ability to create is being overtaken by technology, and with a newfound societal fear of what will happen to the platforms that allow us to express lived experience, the creative output by humanity will naturally become darker with a bit more edge.
Putting fewer bumpers onto the process that limits creativity to more linear interpretations of darker experiences, allows for complex stories to be told that in previous years had been shielded away from, including people being able to talk about difficult elements of life such as motherhood or building a career. Weird Girl Lit can also reflect the truths that we privately harbor, while continuing to feed into stressors such as social media and the way that it can distort the view that we hold of ourselves.
The Continued Legacy
Weird Girl Lit has become essential for those that feel things deeply and crave art that isn't afraid to step into weird territory to get a point across. What may at first shock people, like a girl falling in love with a printer, may weirdly comfort or engage others.
It's important for us to understand that we are not alone in the struggles that we face, even when it feels that way. It's media like Weird Girl Lit that allows for that reminder that at times is desperately needed. Even if our problems are more grounded than the outlandish lens that these stories take, it allows for those struggles to become more manageable after consuming these experiences through reading.
As our society propels forward with its advancements, so too will people's ability to expand their minds beyond the traditional. The Weird Girl Lit subgenre in particular, though it may be somewhat misunderstood, serves an important voice, especially to women, and is here to stay.