The lives of women in their twenties and thirties are ripe for unpacking: it’s a time of great change, personal epiphanies and coming into one’s own. Over the past few years, the enormous popularity of Sally Rooney and her ilk proves that there is a constant hunger for these stories, especially since the ugly truths and minutiae of women’s lives have historically been sidelined.
From covers to content, “sad girl lit” is undoubtedly a current literary trend. It almost always centre on white, heterosexual, middle-class women; while their struggles are valid, they’ve got a lot to fall back on. Some of the books in this field are startlingly original and insightful – Meg Mason’s 2020 novel Sorrow and Bliss is a wry, intelligent exploration of living with mental illness – and some follow a more predictable trajectory of overcoming adversity to find contentment.
