Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Genevieve Novak

Sad Girl Novel by Pip Finkemeyer & Crushing by Genevieve Novak

by
June 2023, no. 454

Pip Finkemeyer’s Sad Girl Novel (Ultimo, $34.99 pb, 304 pp) is likely to divide readers, based on its title alone. For this reader, the immediate response was cynicism: another début about a young woman adrift and feeling sorry for herself? While unhappy women have populated art – and created it – for centuries, in 2023 the ‘sad girl’ is an aesthetic shorthand that conjures images of Ultraviolence-era Lana Del Rey, pale Tumblr girls with dripping makeup, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People. Female pain, flattened into a marketable package.

... (read more)