Sad Girl Novel as Mental Road Map

In which I discuss my current headspace and the books that capture my mood…

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Yesterday, I walked into work and told my colleagues my therapist broke up with me. I work at a fancy university with a bunch of haughty intellectuals, so I figured they’d get a kick out of this zinger. When I first started at the university, the walls were plastered with posters promoting D.E.I. and there were even signs promoting mental health support. Plus, my co-workers seemed just unhinged and overly medicated enough to appreciate the situation. But when I delivered the line, being sure to cover the sad quivering my voice has begun to take on every time I speak, the older woman screamed at our broken printer, then turned to me and said, “we have important people stopping by to pick up these flyers, so I’d keep hush hush about your suicide talk, for now.”

I realized I’d been talking too much about my mental health recently, that my co-workers were getting tired of me. While my job has contributed to a lot of my mental health struggles over the last few months, they’ve also had to deal with my recent inability to hold myself together for any reasonable length of time. They aren’t the only ones who’ve gotten tired of it. Several close friends also reminded me that they weren’t my therapist, that they couldn’t really help me, that I needed to seek help if I wanted to continue to have them in my life. My Momma always says my overwhelming sadness is my least likable quality. All of this is why, when my therapist said within ten minutes of our first session—yes, just the intake—that I needed a therapist more equipped to meet my extensive needs, I felt like it was a sign that things had gone too far, that I was now too broken for even the qualified professionals to help. Trying to act like I was okay while at work felt impossible. But because I didn’t want to be too broken, I sat quietly at my desk and imagined taking one of my lorazepam’s with the same flourish as Parker Posey in the latest season of White Lotus.

I felt this way before, when I was sixteen. I was still in the closet, my Momma was on meth and married to an abusive man who fed her meth and cocaine and whatever else made her dependent on him, and my Granny was still in her homophobic era, constantly dropping hints that if I came out, I would go to hell. It was hard back then, and because I had no autonomy, no control over my life, I felt like I had no way out. Looking back, I think I had plenty of reasons to be depressed. I remember reading Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, a book about a girl who dies by suicide and leaves behind a set of tapes giving all of the reasons why she’d done it, and making jokes about what my own thirteenth reason would be—it turned out, Momma lying about having cancer was that reason. When I was rushed to the emergency room after a half-assed suicide attempt in April of 2010, they sent me away to a place called Hope’s Corner, and I spent a week crying alongside my fellow depressians, all of us hoping (haha, hoping…hope’s corner) we would eventually be better.

A few months later, I moved in with my Momma. I’d started reading Ellen Hopkins books around this time—both a comfort and a trigger—and about four months after my suicide attempt, I picked up her book, Impulse, about three teenagers who attempt suicide and are sent to a place not unlike Hope’s Corner. It was comforting for most of the book, because I was able to see that other kids were going through things similar to what I was. They had trouble in their home lives, some with physical and verbal abuse, molestation, all of these terrible things I was familiar with, and I liked feeling less alone. I was in history class when I finished the last thirty pages of the book, where one of the kids decides that he still can’t keep going, and kills himself. It was, somehow, so unexpected to me, that a book would commit to a kid my age actually dying by suicide. I’d survived my own attempt, and reading this book, with all of these kids looking for hope that things would get better, had begun to infect me with hopefulness that my own situation would get better. Seeing that, for some people, it may never get better, sent me into a spiral. I sobbed uncontrollably, and the teacher, who had no idea why I was crying, since I was supposed to be learning about some historical thing I wasn’t even paying attention to, turned to two other students and asked if they could escort me to the school counselor. I remember explaining, through my hiccup tears, that I was grieving the loss of this fictional character, and she told me that seemed a bit silly and offered me a tissue before sending me back to class.

During difficult times, most people seem to turn to books for escape. I’ve always turned to books for answers. I didn’t read The Hunger Games or Twilight while I was depressed—I always saved those books for when I was happy. Part of me hoped that books like Thirteen Reasons Why and Impulse would offer some insight into why I was like this, and how to fix it. I remember while at Hope’s Corner, they offered us a small selection of books to read, mostly fantasy and uplifting reads, and when I asked if they had Prozac Nation, they said that might not be the best book for me in my current state. I just wanted to see how Elizabeth Wurtzel managed to escape the prison of her mind and went on to become a successful person in the world. It hadn’t occurred to me that a little escapism might be more helpful than submerging myself into a fictional character’s sadness.

I keep thinking about this time in my life and I can’t remember how I got better. One of the conditions for my release for Hope’s Corner was that I would attend weekly therapy for the next few months. I was also prescribed Prozac. My Granny tossed my prescription and replaced it with St. John’s Wort. When I moved in with Momma and started going to my therapist, she reminded me that I couldn’t talk about most of the bad things that were happening to us because I would get taken away. I ended up lying about everything, and so my therapist just thought I was a little brat who was seeking attention. I ended up moving out of Momma’s after only a couple of months, and then I moved in with my Granny again, before eventually staying with my best friend and her family until the summer after my senior year. I guess that was the cure, was being taken out of my toxic environment, being surrounded by a loving support system who took care of all of my needs. People are more willing to do that when you’re a kid.

Mary Karr often talks about the writing of her third memoir, Lit, and how one of the hardest things about writing that book was realizing that she was the bad guy. The first two memoirs focused on her childhood, and during that time, you can mostly blame the adults around you for all of your problems, because they’re often the ones dropping you in the middle of it. But as an adult, you kind of only have yourself to blame for the bad situations you find yourself in.

In my early twenties, just before I got married, I discovered several books that felt like they really understood the feelings I had growing up. People hate A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, but that was the first book I read in adulthood that perfectly described the feelings I had all throughout my adolescence—Jude has gone through years of trauma and abuse, and he’s constantly feeling chased by the bad feelings that are all he’s known for most of his life. I didn’t have it as bad as he did, but I had suffered through years of sexual and physical abuse by strangers and family and their friends, so it was close enough that I began to use the book as a shorthand for explaining to people what I went through. When I didn’t know how to articulate my own experiences, telling people to read the books that understood me felt like offering these people a map to my brain.

One of the books I read both as a depressed teenager and again as a more stable adult was Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. When I read the book in my mid-twenties, I remember thinking, “this book is amazing! Five stars!”…only to discover that I’d actually given the book a middling review years before, and I hadn’t even remembered the experience of reading it.

The reason I loved that book in my twenties was because it captured the feeling I had of reflecting on my history of depression through a more mature and healed lens. My early twenties were spent learning how to laugh at my suffering, how to make it more easily digestible to the average listener, when recounting these events of my life. What Kaysen did was speak frankly and humorously about something that had happened to her years before—she had the distance to be able to truly reflect on this time and see it without the cloud of sadness that hovered over the actual experience, to have the clarity needed that one could only have from distance and decent therapy. And because, in my twenties, I was far enough away from my teenage sadness to almost forget how painful it was, I felt like Kaysen had perfectly captured something close to my own experience of being medically locked away.

The thing I’ve realized recently, since suffering with this depression that is as intense as it was at sixteen, is that Girl, Interrupted isn’t accurate to the feeling of being a depressed person on the verge of a nervous breakdown—it’s accurate to a survivor, someone who made it out. Reading Girl, Interrupted in my mid-twenties felt cathartic and exact to where my own headspace was at, but revisiting it now, with my similarly depressed lens, I realize that the reason I disliked it so much as a teenager is that it almost felt defeating, that this person did the thing I somehow couldn’t manage to do—get better. I know better now, than I did at sixteen, that things do get better, and then worse, and then better again, and that patience and perseverance is the key to survival, but that’s an annoying thing to hear when you’re experiencing all of that sadness for the first time.

Most sad girl books take their queue from writers like Susanna Kaysen, adding snark to their depressed protagonists, letting us know that they may be on edge, but at least they’re witty enough to not be entirely insufferable. I know that many classics also had snarky, sad heroines, but in many ways I feel like Kaysen was the seed for our current crop of sad girl writers. I love Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh and Sarah Rose Etter and Mona Awad—I can’t say if they would like to be considered sad girl novelists—but I’ve realized that many of these writers have to use humor or a fantastical element to help the devastation go down. People don’t have but just so much patience for sad people, whether in real life or in their books.

I’ve gotten so good at telling jokes about how sad I am. I want to be able to conjure my own sad girl jig, to make a joke at the end of this like all of the books I love do. I still feel seen by these books, though in my sadness, I find their masks a little more obvious. Now that I think about it, one of the few pieces of media that might actually get this whole thing right is the first season of Fleabag, where she’s finally confronted with the truth of her actions and her loss, and she can’t keep up the bit anymore.

Maybe that’s what this is, an admission that I can’t keep up the bit. Clearly it sounds like a bit of a spiral if nothing else. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been searching through my past to find the thing that once cured me of my depression, to see what it was exactly that helped me out of my state. But maybe it’s stupid to look at the past for answers, because I’m a different person now, with different problems. Mary Kate couldn’t solve her adult problems with her childhood solutions, partly because now she had to take on more responsibility. I’ve been turning to books again, for answers—maybe that’s a silly thing to do. But I do think there’s got to be something here. People wouldn’t keep writing these if they didn’t have something important to say about the experience of overwhelming sadness that infects some of us.

I know others feel this way. Maybe this isn’t the right place to talk about my sadness, but because I’m a mood reader, being sad impacts what I read and how I interpret what I read. It feels like a significant part of the conversation. And also, I’ve always been uncomfortably honest with every single person I’ve interacted with in my life, whether it’s my Granny or the woman at the grocery store who asks, “how are you, today?”

That’s all for now. Hoping to be back with more explicitly book focused newsletters soon—I appreciate you all taking the time to read.

Until next time,

XOXO