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shrimpchipsssThis substack post on the era-defining trope of “single late 20s-early 30s white women [which] recycles different iterations of the same boring, selfish, reckless, cynical and unmoored depressive figure with a dissatisfying sex life that they organize the rest of their lives around,” says everything I’d want to say and so much more about this archetype. What I want to talk about
Is that there is a way to write a bitter, wry, self-aware woman who isn’t a dissociated and agency-less spiral of nothingness and despair.
The reactionary quality of the empty lit fic woman gives her the appearance of a personality when it is really just inertia. Her identity is signaled by cultural items or interpersonal exchanges that create a perfect self-insert vessel to the young urban female reader.
The protagonist of Severance by Ling Ma (who isn’t white) stands out as having more agency and selfhood than the aforementioned protagonists but is still my favorite example of how lists of the capitalist markers of a person’s life make them recognizable and thus inhabitable to the reader.
“Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right. Or something like that, the usual ways of justifying your life, of passing time. With the money I made, I bought Shiseido facial exfoliants, Blue Bottle coffee, Uniqlo cashmere.”
(Longer excerpt here if you’re a depressed yuppie and want to feel like your life is nothing.)
Ling Ma was making a point about the emptiness of life in a capitalist system (to great effect!! That passage eviscerated 2019 me) but a collection of commodities isn’t a person. It’s a starter pack meme or an ad agency’s target audience profile.
The genderbent Bobbi in the recent runs of Company also falls into this non-character-ness, though she is less self hating and more just lost. The buoyancy of Company prevents the spiral, but Bobbi is so reactionary as to still be no one.
It’s all very Newton’s third law. If I were to push the character, the character would push back in equal measure. If I were to push Attolia Irene she’d likely stab me at least.
Three of my favorite books this year followed a theme, the vengeful queen, which kicked off with the Hazards of Love album in January.
Attolia Irene from the Queen’s Thief series, Queen Orual of Glome from Till We Have Faces by C.S. Louis, and Bim from Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai. Characters that have limited choices and ample reason to wallow or dissociate in despair, and are gloriously, viciously, alive.
Attolia (and knowing that Megan Whalen Turner is the biggest Diana Wynne Jones fan I need to dedicate 2023 to the rest of the Ingary trilogy and beyond) even as the walls close in is scheming and plotting for a way out. The diminishing political choices and pressure to take a suitor don’t render her into a passive nonentity, they intensify her grappling with the choices she’s going to make. The situation lays open her regret towards Eugenides, her fear that it is a mockery, the disbelief that he could love her, her shock that she might love him back. Even in her youth, she wears the picture of passivity without becoming it.
Queen Orual might haunt me the most, having convinced her sister Psyche to look upon the face of her lover Cupid because her marriage couldn’t be real, must have been a sham, thus revealing Cupid to be a god and exiling Psyche forevermore. She must bear with what she has done and carry on in grief and guilt. Her becoming the veiled warrior queen is breathtaking.
Finally, Bim, not a literal queen but holding court over her family household as a teacher and the caretaker of her disabled brother. The sibling who stayed rather than run away with a rich husband or waste away spinning up idealistic dreams of the future. Though a lot of her motivation for staying is duty, there’s richness to her conflict with her sister and the way she conducts herself and the bitterness she bears.
For all that these women appear to share in common with the empty lit fic protagonist, they have substance to them. I’m relieved that archetype is “over,” whatever that means for publishing. How utterly fucking bleak to think that’s all there is to life. Even Miss Havisham, stuck in time and inaction, cut a more interesting figure.
My descriptions of my favorite books feel insufficient. If I loved you less I could talk about it more. I highly recommend these three books/series which were recommendations to me. Thank you to virgomoon and Faatima, to Lia, to eggburial.
