18/100 - Enough of the Girl Lit

I am not writing for you.

A while ago, a critic tweeted that they were over mad/sad girl lit. At the time, it felt a little like an Ava Anna Ada sub-tweet, since, if you’re being reductive, it’s both mad and sad girl lit. This critic decreed it over, and really, they had a point.

I am over sad girl lit. I’m over mad girl lit. I’m over bad girl lit. I’m over poly girl lit cos they’re coming for that too, now Open Season’s out and how dare we talk about the nuance of sexuality, behaviour, mental and emotional health and expect it to be anything other than labelled something something girl lit. Yes, I am over girl lit.

I’m over it because I’m over having years of work reduced to something that simple. I’m over it for my colleagues too. I’m over critics decreeing something over when there’s a reason women are repeatedly drawn to explore these themes. Yes, I am over critics calling women girls. I am over the effect it has on the potential of our work to be taken seriously.

We don’t need a reductive label. When I was severely anorexic as a teenager, I was lucky it was taken seriously. I was fortunate that largely clinicians didn’t reduce it in the way it often is - a teenage girl wanting to be thin. Silly girl, concerned with little other than appearances. There’s a reason anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental health disorder, and it’s not simply because it involves starvation - it’s because we dismiss it as a teenage girl thing, and what’s clear from the labels attached to girl lit - girls don’t matter. They aren’t serious or substantial, they can’t be windows on to a world other one fixated with style over substance. I call time on that. I was a deeply serious teenager, I’m deeply serious adult. I was also a teenager who collected Elle magazine, NME and Melody Maker, Vogue when I could afford it, Vanity Fair if I was exceptionally flush. I loved and love clothes. My Instagram saves are largely Calvin Klein circa ‘96, a lot of Carolyn Bissette-Kennedy. I cam talk for hours about the importance of a good silhouette, the power of a good white shirt, the joy of a well cut coat - see, I don’t want to stop. During my internship I used to catalogue fabrics for a large multi-national, sometimes I wish I still was. The sheer pleasure of touch, daily. I spend hours at flea markets and in second hand shops. I like these times, when the need for words goes away, it’s all about feeling, touching, seeing. It is the most pleasing then. But we have been taught to be afraid of our senses and sensual things, and so we see them as less serious, and in turn, less worthy, in the same was we see teenage girls. We fail to understand these ways of seeing ourselves, of trying new selves, are ways of working out the world, configuring it on our own terms. I am exploring this in my second novel, it’s a relief to have the space to do it.

There’s a lot to be said too about critics as cultural gate-keepers, about who decides what’s over and what’s not, about fashions in literature. But I’m not going to say it. Or here at least. I often have to remind myself of Louise Bourgeois, see, we need our allies, who rarely made work to order and never to please. Never to please, remember that.

I cared and care about what I look like. I think clothes are complicated, I think make up is too, I find the body and its modes of expression endlessly fascinating. I fucking love being a woman for all it’s complicated. I can be both the most serious person in the room and the biggest clown, often in the same sentence. What I can’t tolerate are easy labels and the messages they carry. One of the most complicated times of my life was when I was a teenager. It’s hard work being a girl. The hardness of the work of being a girl hasn’t left me. I write about it because I think it matters. I think it matters to write about inner lives, some people are fortunate enough to perhaps not have a mad bad sad inner life - but I think I’m fortunate that I do, and if the complexity of that’s reflected in my work, I feel I’ve done my job well. Is it girl lit? No. Is it over? Definitely not. Is dismissing it over? Yup.