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A collage of images featuring two crying eyes, a pile of books and a wilting flower.

Why So Sad, Girl

with Madeleine Gray, Neha Kale and Jessie Tu, moderated by Bridie Jabour

10 March 2024

In the Studio

Sydney Opera House Presents

Talks and Ideas

The new ‘Sad Girl Novel’ has officially hit market saturation. Why has the last six years of contemporary fiction been so gripped by this trope - and can the sad girl ever get happy?

Co-curated by Bri Lee

The superlative embodiment of an alluring silhouette: a woman contoured and whittled by her suffering.

Leslie Jamison, The Cult of the Literary Sad Woman, The New York Times 

What’s really behind the doom and gloom?

It’s the literary phenomenon that has no end. Every month, a new ‘Sad Girl Novel’ hits the shelves. Privileged young female protagonists are unfulfilled by sex and their careers; they are deep in their thoughts and feelings, complicated, full of self-loathing, and self-absorbed. It’s as if they have landed on some great insight that the rest of us don’t see. (Except perhaps the millions of us who buy these books.) What’s driving this seemingly insatiable appetite? Is it simply that life actually does suck and we know it and, finally, we feel seen? And why does the sad girl attract so much eye-rolling critique? Is this just another way sideline art made by and for women? 

Join this panel of practitioners and critics of the trope, who will dig even deeper than the sad girl herself to come to some possibly surprising takes. 

Presented by Sydney Opera House

 

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