“I just don’t want to be another Trinity student who writes another story about a sad girl in her early 20s being swallowed up by Dublin,” my friend said as we sat in Bestseller last semester, hammering out the kinks on her creative writing Capstone proposal. She had been filtering through different genres to write about before I suggested contemporary fiction, to which she scoffed and delivered the aforementioned line. Although I found this sentiment funny, I looped into Hodges Figgis on the way home to look at the recent Trinity graduates who filled the contemporary fiction section. It’s not a new observation that Sally Rooney writes female protagonists that fit the description of the sad girl in her mid-twenties flailing in Dublin. However, to start and end our melancholic archetype’s development between the covers of Normal People seems, quite frankly, lazy. Our sad girl archetype has appeared in works by other Trinity alumni including Catherine Prasifka, Megan Nolan, Louise Nealon, and Naoise Dolan, to name a few. It seems that our new gloomy heroine has been a focus for many new and emerging female voices in the Irish literary scene. Although I’ve heard this fact be framed as a criticism of these works, I don’t believe it is. Most of these authors have appeared on bestseller lists for their novels centred around figuring out young adulthood. Rooney won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Nolan was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and Nealon’s Snowflake won Newcomer of the Year at the An Post Book Awards. I’m more interested by the questions of: who is our sad girl in her twenties? Where did she come from? And why can we not get enough of her?
Perhaps many people’s first encounter with the sad girl archetype would have been in Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Published in 2018, Rooney’s novel quickly grew in popularity and was adapted into a Hulu miniseries starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones. Both the novel and TV show follow characters Marianne and Connell as they sway in and out of each other’s lives, from their teenage years to adults graduating college. Marianne is described as timid and sensitive, mysterious and aloof, unpopular but intriguing. We watch as Marianne tries to navigate romantic relationships and friendships while she feels she is undeserving of love.
“Although Marianne has many layers, this feeling of unlovability underwrites much of her character, which manifests in many toxic relationships, swallowed feelings, and sombre shots of Edgar Jones in the TV series”
If we look across to Rooney’s debut novel Conversation with Friends, we see a similar expression of our sad girl figuring out what she deserves in the form of Francis. Like Marianne, Francis is a young Trinity student struggling with self-esteem, leading to a messy and toxic relationship with the married Nick. The two characters share a myriad of characteristics: they each have brown hair, are thin, pale, dull, filled with existential dread and, importantly for our sad girl blueprint, suffer from a lack of self-love. This deep self loathing leaves both Marianne and Francis feeling isolated and alone.
This concept of being an outsider in one’s own life is quite important to our archetypal sad college girl. Take Debbie in Nealon’s Snowflake, who grew up milking cows in rural Maynooth and suddenly finds herself in a city that she doesn’t seem to fit into. Her alienation from her peers may stem from her rural upbringing, but it appears, often dangerously, in her platonic and romantic relationships. Debbie lacks a sense of belonging, which often makes her feel misunderstood and lonely.
Although not an outsider in Dublin like the gloomy protagonists we’ve already looked at, Pasifika’s Sophie from None of This Is Serious also feels lonely and alienated from her peers. Sophie also demonstrates another key quality of our sad girl in her twenties archetype, which is a “pity-me” mentality.
“All of our sad girls wallow in their own despair for their respective books’ durations, often feeling helpless in their own loneliness and having a blindness to how their self-loathing actions affect those around them”
In None of This Is Serious, Sophie’s obsession with social media pulls her further along her own downward spiral, which sinks her deeper into self-pity. She sees herself as lonely and distant from her friends, which puts strains on most of her relationships. Blinded by their own sadness, our melancholic archetype often spirals in their own self-pity until someone, usually their best friend, tells them that they need to snap out of it. This usually coincides with the main conflict our protagonists face, which leaves our sad girls beginning to face their issues and become, well, a little less sad.
Although our sad girl seems to feature in many young Trinity writers’ works, she does not only appear in novels that were conceived around the campanile. Our sad girl has appeared in novels by authors such as Niamh Campbell, Emilie Pine, Annie MacManus. We can’t seem to get enough of her. Books about her are still hitting the bestseller list, plays are still being performed around her melancholies, and movies are still being made about her struggles to fit in.
“I can’t help but wonder if our love for the sad girl comes from growing up with the closely related manic pixie dream girl, bound now between the covers of John Green novels in most young adults’ childhood bedrooms”
The messy and chaotic manic pixie dream girl, filled with contradictions and vibrancy, was an iconic character for anyone growing up in the 2010s. Characters like Effy Stonem from Skins, Margot from Paper Towns, and Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind filled the media I consumed in my early teenage years. She was intoxicating, exciting and fantastical and I quickly fell head over heels for her unrealistic stereotype. Maybe a love for the now retired manic pixie dream girl has opened a soft spot for us to accept the less zesty sad girl as our new leading lady. Maybe we view our sad girl as a manic pixie dream girl who grew up. Or perhaps there is a part of us who can simply relate to our sad girl. Loneliness, self-doubt, and the feeling of not being good enough is something that most people face in their early twenties. A time that is filled with opportunity and excitement is also filled with uncertainty and doubt. With a pressure to always make the most of our early adulthood and always make the right decision, maybe a part of us can see ourselves in our sad girl who wallows in existential dread. Watching our sad girl tackle feelings of uncertainty and anxiety might provide us with a certain comfort, that even though we’re in the best years of our lives, we are still figuring things out.
