At this point in the millennial life cycle, sad girl literature is inescapable: it has taken on a sprawling life of its own, with a distinctive cover design style as well as a tonal aesthetic.
From Sally Rooney to Ottessa Moshfegh to Melissa Broder, the typical novel goes something like this: twentysomething woman (likely white and middle-class) has a crisis; is selfish; does messy, chaotic things. Sometimes she might have a revelation; other times she won’t. She’s often unlikeable, she’s usually untrustworthy, but she is, above all, relatable.
Melbourne author Pip Finkemeyer is owning the label with her debut, literally titled Sad Girl Novel. Keenly self-aware, the book both inhabits and deconstructs the genre through its unreliable narrator, 27-year-old Kim Mueller, who’s trying to write her own sad girl novel in a year, while living in Berlin in 2019.
Kim is obsessed with a handsome, emotionally unavailable literary agent. She relies heavily on her therapist Debbie and best friend Bel, who’s expecting a child through an anonymous sperm donor. As she becomes more involved in Berlin’s literary world, Kim finds herself constantly trying to impress people who she also views with extreme disdain. Sad Girl Novel takes the reader into both the publishing industry and the mind of an egocentric young woman who yearns for validation.
Finkemeyer, 35, feels conflicted about the genre, which she says can sometimes be mean-spirited. Her approach blends this disaffected ennui with a kind of nervous sincerity. “I think that’s the challenge … this really weird mix of being aware of how problematic something is, but also complicit in it,” she explains. “You can’t just be critiquing and satirising – it has to have a firm heart and soul.”
Even Moshfegh, whose 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a prime example of the genre, has questioned the “sad girl” label: “I don’t want anyone overdosing on Ambien because they read my book,” she said. “This is satire, this is not real.” Yet this genre has only become more omnipresent in the pandemic years since – and the lives of young women are more existentially fraught than ever.
Finkemeyer’s novel stays one step ahead of the reader by critiquing the genre’s tropes and trademarks along the way. “All of those potential criticisms were things that I had thought already about anything I would write, and I had to get over that,” she says.
Sad Girl Novel explores “some of those slower, more muted feelings”. It’s very interior, with much of the action taking place within Kim’s mind. Twisty and discombobulating, its nonlinear structure echoes the experience of being deeply lost in your 20s. “The emotional stakes are not that huge in the scheme of things,” Finkemeyer admits – but as anyone who has been that age knows, it feels like life or death at the time.
Finkemeyer started writing the novel in Berlin, where she lived for five years beginning in her late 20s. But her protagonist is not an avatar – while some of Kim’s life is based in reality, other parts are an amalgamation of the writer’s friends’ experiences, or entirely invented.
“I started it from a place of making fun of myself, but then she grew into an entirely different person,” Finkemeyer says. “She’s quite separate from me, because I want people to feel comfortable to critique her.”
Kim is the archetypal left-leaning arty type – the kind of young woman who hates Jordan Peterson as much as she loves smoking rollies. In a sardonic, often very funny voice, Finkemeyer sends up her own circles, and their often performative politics: “I was a terrible socialist. Okay, I wasn’t a socialist at all. I probably couldn’t even provide a decent definition of the word. But I did know it was cool to be one,” Kim thinks at one point.
Both the author and character acknowledge the privileges of living a creative life abroad: “It was a cliché for all lost white girls in major metropolises to think they had a novel in them,” Finkemeyer writes.
Finkemeyer explains: “I was struggling with the fact that writing a novel seemed like a really self-centred thing to do, especially because a lot of debut novels by young women are autobiographical – there is something really ugly about writing about yourself.”
But while Kim has flashes of this type of self-awareness, she’s frequently oblivious and borderline delusional – a gender-flipped version of the tortured male genius. Kim’s worldview is myopic and solipsistic, yet there’s a certain charm to the character.
“I’m trying to balance the meta-ness and the tongue-in-cheek references with me wanting to give readers a serious, real part of myself with real emotional depth,” she says.
Kim and Bel’s twin acts of creation embody the image of two paths diverging in a wood. In a passage where Kim considers her future, Finkemeyer draws on Sylvia Plath’s image of the fig tree from The Bell Jar: “I was worried that by the time I awkwardly crab-walked along the branch of trying to be a novelist and realised there was nothing at the end for me, all the other fruit I could have picked would have withered and died in the meantime.”
This, too, is personal for the author. “Around the time I was writing this novel, it was very divergent for me: I could have pursued the whole baby thing, or I could have turned my back on that and concentrated more on writing,” she says. “Some people can do both, but for me, it was either or … I feel like I’ve made my decision now, and I’m happy about it.”
Sad Girl Novel by Pip Finkemeyer is out now through Ultimo Press
