Good reader! It takes a strong optimist to keep your spirits up during the day. The news picture and autumn evenings fight over who can keep it darkest. Perhaps it’s not entirely coincidental that something struck me in the heart when I read about sad girl literature. In today’s Book Letter, I examine what is meant by this TikTok phenomenon, and invite you to create a Norwegian list of similar books. I also offer an autumn poem and an award-winning novel that sees the Earth from a space station. A bit of everything, in other words. If you’re a young person who follows Book tok, you’re probably rolling your eyes at the fact that I just discovered the phenomenon of sad girl books. (In my defense, news employees are not allowed to have TikTok on their mobile.) But if you’re not on TikTok either, maybe you’re also curious about what sad girl books means. On Tiktok, “sad girl” books are recommended. Tiktok As a grown woman, I was a little skeptical. I was also once a sad girl, because who doesn’t struggle with melancholy and existential questions in adolescence. But now I had outgrown that sort of thing, right? A look at recommended sad girl novels surprised me. Here were several books that I enjoyed very much! So what’s behind the label? Three books I read before I heard about the term “sad girl”, which I have recommended to many Photo: Bonnier forlag, Aschehoug, Pelikanen There are two original sad girls in this English-language tradition, and they are Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. Both killed themselves, but managed to leave behind poems, novels and essays that tower over literary history. In their books we find three of the basic features a sad girl book must have: 1. The main character is a woman, and the books are told in the first person. 2. This woman struggles with depression or other psychological challenges. 3. She is highly intelligent and well-read. The grandmothers of the Sad Girl books: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf Photo: Giovanni Giovaneyyi/Grazia Neri and George Charles Beresford/ Adam Cuerden / news I’m not sure if Virginia Woolf felt so pretty, but Sylvia Plath was beautiful and aware of it. Along with the subject tag #sadgirl, you often find #hotgirl. So our fourth point is: 4. The female protagonist is beautiful. Beauty is thematised, for example she may be pretty on the outside but feel ugly on the inside. And then there is something that needs to be cleared out of the way for it to be a true sad girl book, and that is finances. This is not “Karen’s Christmas”. Our depressed girls are not sad because they are tired after work or worried about the next salary. So then we can state: 5. The female protagonist is rich, or money is not a driving force for her. Now you look at our five points so far and think: Hello! This sad girl person is rich, young, beautiful, smart and then she’s depressed?! Isn’t this what we all dream of being? I’ve thought about it, and I think maybe she just HAS to be beautiful, young, rich and smart for the sadness stuff to come through properly. We are talking about a more vague melancholy, a weltschmerz, or a discomfort in the present. If we look at newer novels in the #sadgirl universe, I would like to add two new points: 6. The woman is young, childless and preferably loverless. 7. The woman submits to degrading sex with men, as if she uses sex as a form of self-harm. Point six goes without saying, but I find point seven unpleasant reading. Often there is self-hatred behind it, as in Sally Rooney’s “Normal People”. It can also be about abuse in younger years, as in “My Dark Vanessa”. Two editions of “My Year of rest and Relaxation”, a novel that is shared a lot under the tag sad girl, and that people love or hate Photo: Penguin Ok, enough definition now. Why do we enjoy reading about these really successful but depressed women? That is a question we could use a seminar to answer. But I think it may be about comfort: – Look, these rich, young, beautiful women are also depressed! Or it can be about recognition: – I don’t feel good in the world, for God’s sake let me read about someone else who feels that way. One could dismiss these books as self-absorbed, and say that they focus on rich people’s problems. That’s fair. But I find an existential yearning and defiance that resonates within me. As a human being who lives a law-abiding A4 life, hanging out with a woman who gives a damn is cool. I can also want to lay down to sleep for a whole year, like the narrator in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”, and I enjoy it when she smears feces on the artwork of a pretentious artist. In contrast to chick lit and loop novels, sad girl novels tend to maintain a high literary level, they are edgy and are taken seriously by the critics. We must remember that sad girls is not a strict genre designation or a recipe, just a topic peg that allows people to tip each other about good reading experiences. Books shared on Book tok are mainly in English. We have to take responsibility and create a Norwegian canon with deppa girls novels! On Penguin’s list of Essential Sad Girl Literature we find Norwegian Jenny Hval’s “Oh hate god”. Coincidentally, the Reading Club is busy with “Heroin Chic” by Maria Tjos Fonn now, and it struck me right away that it is definitely a depressed girl novel. Then we have two! Maria Tjos Fonn has several novels that could fit the label sad girl. Photo: Oda Berby / Aschehoug publishing house I have a couple of suggestions, but am more curious about what you think. Give me your tip in the comments section or by email. And if you come up with a better translation of sad girl books than depressed girl books, I’m all ears. After reading two sad girl novels on the rap, I was ready for other perspectives, and you’ll get that right away, after some autumn poetry. Poem of the week This year I have been particularly excited about autumn. Eastern Norway has delivered sparkling sunny days and the leaves have hung for an unusually long time, with a rich palette of yellow, orange and red. Not least my nose finds joy in autumn. No other season smells so good, so much and so varied. If I go for a walk in the fields or in the city, my nose sniffs eagerly so that the wings of the nose vibrate like a bird dog. Photo: Øyvind Sandnes In early autumn, the sweet scent of overripe apples and plums dominates, it can almost smell like sweet chewing gum. After a heavy rain, the heather and the grass repent with a touch of the mushroom’s umami scent. Now in late autumn, the smell of rotting leaves dominates, on their way to becoming nutrient-rich soil. It is a mature and complex smell, like cigars, or spicy stews. Many autumn poems are about death and not about how beautiful the season is, but this verse from Halldis Moren Vesaas’s poem “Autumn” is at least about the smell. “Autumn smells like red-brown apples, like wind that sweeps over land and sea, like something new that is waiting, and like something old that is going away.” Earth from Space I don’t know about you about movies from space, but I enjoy pretty much everything from sci-fi horror like “Alien” and “Sunshine” to documentaries about the moon landing. Solar panels from the ISS in front of Earth, where we can see the lights from, among other things, Oslo Photo: NASA Strangely enough, I would say, because I get both agoraphobia of the infinite space and claustrophobia of spaceships with narrow passages. Maybe minus and minus become plus? In the sci-fi genre, there are many opportunities to stay in space, both in novels and films. Realistic novels mostly stay on the globe, right? So when the Booker Prize jury this week announced that this year’s winner is “Orbital”, a novel set on the International Space Station (ISS), I was quick to download it. Samantha Harvey with one of the world’s most prestigious awards, for a novel that is the second shortest winner of the Booker Prize ever. Photo: Alberto Pezzali / AP We meet four astronauts and two cosmonauts during one day on Earth. I write “earth day”, because the space station circles the Earth once every 91 minutes, and each chapter is dedicated to a round around Tellus (orbit from the title). Even here I was blown away. Earthly life is so marked by the course of the sun, by the daily cycle of waking up and getting up. What happens to the body and head when the sun rises and sets 16 times in 24 hours? Part of the joy of reading “Orbital” is learning about how body and mind work in space. An astronaut who wakes up does not feel the weight of his body against the mattress. They have to look at their arm to know it’s there. Tears are suspended in the air and must be caught so as not to cause damage. How strange it must be! Of course, I can also get such information from the internet or a documentary. The big test for a novelist is whether she manages to portray the feeling of seeing Earth and space in a poignant way. An astronaut outside the space station, tied by the foot Photo: NASA Samantha Harvey has told the BBC that at one point she gave up writing this book, she didn’t feel she had the right to do it without having been in space. After thousands of hours of watching the space station’s live feed, she found the courage to finish writing. Fortunately. Harvey writes well both about the scientific and everyday tasks on the space station, and about the overwhelming impressions from space, such as here: “The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.” Among 150 novels nominated for the award, the jury was unanimous that “Orbital” was this year’s winner. Not only because it is good and original, but because it felt like a book we need now, they said. So heartily agree! The distance to the globe means that borders are blurred, wars and suffering come from a distance seen from the space station. At the same time, the crew monitors a typhoon which they realize will take lives. The mother of the Japanese astronaut dies far down there. The astronauts look at Earth with tenderness and love for the people and the bustling life on the blue planet, a tenderness that is contagious. The publisher Gursli Berg has bought the book for translation into Norwegian, but if you read it before then in English, please write to me and tell me what you thought. Dream assignment? The time has come to apply to sit on the jury for the Lytternes novel prize. Here you will find information: If you are selected to sit on the jury, you will receive the nominated novels in the post before Christmas. Comment Back to sad girl novels: Which Norwegian novels can fit into such a category? And is it for you? Hello! Welcome to dialogue at news. Since you are logged in to other news services, you do not have to log in again here, but we need your consent to our terms of use for online dialogue Published 17.11.2024, at 07.47
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Book Letter #42 What is “Sad Girl” literature and why is it popular? – Siss Vik’s book letter
