Naomi Kanakia went to review one novel — Stacey Yu’s Kitten, about a young woman obsessed with her boyfriend’s cat — and ended up reading the whole “weird girl literature” canon, the BookTok-born genre (term coined around 2020) for novels about detached, anhedonic young women in dead-end jobs. Her verdict, against her own expectations: the books are strikingly good.
The high points, in her telling:
- I Who Have Never Known Men (Harpman, 1995) is “a masterpiece” — women trapped in a cage on a dead planet, walking a perfect line between incident and emptiness; it flopped in English for thirty years until a 2022 reissue went viral
- Sky Daddy (Kate Folk) is her favorite American entry — a protagonist sexually attracted to airplanes who still has social intelligence, inside a world that is alive and bigger than her
- Ripe (Sarah Rose Etter) is “an accurate description of the post-rebellion mindset of the millennial office worker — like Fight Club, except there’s no fight club”
- Convenience Store Woman reads as a sardonic inversion of Sartre’s bad-faith waiter: Keiko’s embrace of her role is the authentic choice
The real target of the essay is literary snobbery. Kanakia dismantles The Point’s takedown of BookTok (“Common Readers”), which condemns how ordinary readers talk about books rather than the books themselves. Her counter: judge a literary community by its fruits, and here the fruits are excellent — a genre barely five years old is reliably elevating books of real quality.
The genre’s tricks — financial precarity, suicidal misery, unsustainable behavior, the slightly happier best friend — are hard to pull off, since near-plotless novels must be excellent page by page. It could fossilize into stale gestures eventually, but most of these books weren’t written as weird-girl novels. They’re books with similar aims, facing narrative problems that can only be solved in a few ways.