So, who gets to call themselves a Sad Girl? In Females Andrea Long Chu picks up where Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto left off, offering a provocation: ‘Everyone is female, and everyone hates it’. Chu characterises femaleness as a ‘universal existential condition’ that is intrinsically bad for the self: a female hollows herself out to make room for other people’s desires. No wonder then that the girl (who might be female, or who might be everyone) writing her Lonely Girl Phenomenology is sad, sad, sad.

The (white) Sad Girl is famously epitomised by the protagonists of Salley Rooney’s novels and musician Lana Del Rey’s songs ‘Sad Girl’ and ‘Pretty When You Cry’. Pip Finkemeyer’s tongue-in-cheek Sad Girl Novel critiques the genre’s tropes and echoes back to OG Sad Girl Sylvia Plath:

Some people would say that taking a year off in your mid-to-late twenties to try something new is not the biggest deal in the scheme of things. But those people are stupid and out of touch and have never read the Wikipedia page for The Bell Jar like I have. […] 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.

Like Finkemeyer’s self-reflexive Sad Girl Novel protagonist, Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today persona, sparked by her @sosadtoday tweets, engages with the Sad Girl trope: ‘Right now the committee in my head is saying, ‘Why are you writing about your relationship to the calories in fruit, you privileged piece of shit?’’. While diaries are inherently a Sad Girl form, the memoir genre is filled with delicious melancholy in the form of Kendra Allen, Anne Boyer, Rachel Cusk, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Terese Marie Mailhot, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Lidia Yuknavitch and others whose sadness can be traced in their writings. Many of these melancholic voices write as an act of political protest and/or to emolliate the trauma of gendered violence. They are not just sad for the sake of being sad.

In ‘Sad by Design’, Geert Lovink describes technological sadness as ‘the default mental state of the online billions’ where social media is omnipresent, indistinguishable from society, and the 24/7 news cycle leaves us zombified and depleted. The ever-present digital – the internet of things – triggers dopamine spikes and comedowns. There’s no retreating from distractions that suck us back into the endlessly refreshable babble. In the realm of performative mental health, Lovink crowns Melissa Broder the ‘contemporary expert in matters of apathy, sorry and uselessness’; in Broder’s So Sad Universe, the real and virtual are ‘all part of one large delirium, an inexorable spiral downwards’. It is Broder’s deadpan delivery that translates her endless stream of self-critique into pure comedy.

I find less sympathy for the sort of conspicuous sadness that plays out online without any nod to the irony of its own production. Content demands a level of engagement that’s out of reach for the truly, inexorably sad: attention equals time equals money and the first-person industrial complex factors into every social media post. Lovink locates a type of technological sadness that emerges in the ‘gap between the self-image of a perceived social status and the actual precarious reality’, which can be understood ‘as a mirror phenomenon of the self-promotion machine’ between curated self and anti-self. In a hilarious take on pecuniary signalling on Instagram, A. Natasha Joukovsky calls the sense of having two distinct selves, one digital and one physical, egoic bifurcation. Believe too much in one’s digital self-mythology and one risks becoming a brand.

Performing conspicuous sadness requires nuance. During the saddest period in my life I was most keenly aware that I was living in a tragi-comedy. Humour felt the most humane response to the futility of our common march toward the inevitable abyss. In one scene: abject tears. In the next: bowled-over hysterics. At my lowest point, having lost my grandfather the morning of my mother’s funeral, and having failed at my pie-hole vocation, I hooked up with a clown. The sex was awful, the absolute worst, but what else but real life could manifest such satire. Even in the depths of nihilistic despair, I laughed so hard I cried. A timeline which is conspicuously sad all the time, or even a glossy timeline punctuated by the occasional behind-the-scenes exposé to communicate authenticity, stinks of adherence to a style guide. Life is so much bigger than a person as a fixed brand, so where technological sadness afflicts consumers desperate to keep up with the Kardashian industrial complex, I can’t fucking bring myself to care.

I am reminded of what Anne Boyer says about click-bait, how it bathes us ‘in what claims to be the light of knowledge but is only the unflattering fluorescence of data’. Or Sally Olds’s take on content as ‘placeholder or void’, a thing that ‘transforms everything it touches into more of itself’. Hot takes and polemics designed for viral potential. Look hard enough and you fall into a void of emptiness. Take Charlotte Stroud’s essay ‘The Curse of the Cool Girl Novelist’, the most vapid of all the recent Sad Girl critiques. In this viral invective Stroud charges that the Sad Girl novel has devolved into parody and should be tempered with actual humour instead of ‘sophisticated funnies’. Stroud’s flimsy essay, which fails to quote any contemporary woman novelist, is just one in a long line of click-baity takedowns of writing by women whose protagonists (real or fictionalised) are sad, lonely or depressed. (Janet Malcolm did it to Sylvia Plath.) Stroud says the genre is populated by anti-heroines who are painfully aware of their own objectification under patriarchy and are chronically anxious due to capitalism, systemic inequality and the pressures of their post-graduate studies. Not only are these girls alienated, they are so eager for their ‘irrelevant references to artworks and philosophical texts’ to be celebrated that they feel they must cloak their zeal ‘with a veil of teenage angst’. Stroud’s click-bait misses nuance, overlooks double meanings, pretends not to get morbid humour – kind of like when I accidentally read Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation as memoir, thereby missing the satire, which was basically the entire point.

Artist Audrey Wollen spoke with Cultist in 2014 about coining Sad Girl Theory partially in response to the dismissive metaphor of the Young-Girl as consumer subject in Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. According to Nylon, ‘the ethereal, red-haired beauty transformed her feed into her very own art gallery, where she is the main attraction’. Dazed reports her as saying:

Sad Girl Theory is a permission slip: feminism doesn’t need to advocate for how awesome and fun being a girl is. Feminism needs to acknowledge that being a girl in the world right now is one of the hardest things there is – it is unimaginably painful – and that our pain doesn’t need to be discarded in the name of empowerment. It can be used as a material, a weight, a wedge, to jam that machinery and change those patterns.

Wollen’s use of Sad Girl Theory to demand that sadness has a witness parallels the sentiments in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. Kraus questions the so-called arbitrariness of careers in art because ‘WHO GETS TO SPEAK AND WHY?, […], IS THE ONLY QUESTION’. She writes to save her life, because she cannot stop writing, because she is overflowing with ideas that no one will listen to. Like it or not, Dick/Dear Diary/DD is her witness.

Although Wollen has deleted her pre-2019 Instagram tiles – all of the Instagram links in her 2015 Huffpost profile are broken – blogger Catherine Rose Bluemke shares an image grab of an undated @audreywollen post which explains Sad Girl Theory:

THE SAD GIRL HAS ‘DADDY ISSUES’, A BRUISED SEXUALITY

THE SAD GIRL ESCHEWS THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF DOMESTICITY

THE SAD GIRL AVOIDS THE DOMESTIC NOT OUT OF DEFIANCE BUT A SELF-DESIGNATED INCOMPETENCE

THE SAD GIRL HAS A HISTORY OF DISORDERED EATING, IF NOT TOTAL ANOREXIA

THE SAD GIRL CONSISTENTLY STRUGGLES WITH HER WEIGHT, DESPITE BEING TOLD HER SIZE IS ACCEPTABLE

THE SAD GIRL SETS TRENDS

THE SAD GIRL HAS OBVIOUS INVESTMENT IN INDIVIDUAL STYLE AND PERSONA

THE SAD GIRL MAINTAINS A NONCHALANCE THAT ANTICIPATES BEING STOLEN FROM

I imagine Wollen’s pro-anorexia stance would’ve provoked scorn. Also, the last line feels gauche but it is likely she was referencing Richard Prince’s appropriating Instagram posts, including many sexualised images of women, for his ‘New Portraits’ exhibition which he sold for 90,000 USD apiece.