Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster

by Caroline Hagood

A combination of memoir, cultural critique, and manifesto, Weird Girls traces the art monster-the writer, often coded monstrous and male, single-mindedly dedicated to the work-from ancient myth to modern literature and pop culture to ask: what happens when the art monster is a woman and/or mother? And what's the connection between creativity and monstrosity? Told in brief, thoughtful, drolly charming chapters, Weird Girls offers a groundbreaking take on art, motherhood, and of course the art monster.

"Caroline Hagood's Weird Girls is part manifesto, part homage, and part long-form essay—a tribute and a call to arms for women artists and particularly mothers to embrace what Jenny Offill calls "the art monster" in her novel, The Department of Speculation. Drawing on the monsters of her own childhood and an impressive archive of women writers, comedians, and essay theory, Hagood encourages us to embrace our inner monsters so that we can create the monstrous, specific, grotesque, witchy, and embodied work that the world so desperately needs. Her interludes on her own mothering and monstrosity are especially moving and thrilling. In this time of forced birth, right-wing religious grabs for the autonomy of marginalized people, and late capitalism, this book is a much-needed balm and call-to-arms for all of us to be our full selves."

—Carley Moore, author of The Not Wives and Panpoclaypse

"Caroline Hagood's decision to embrace her 'inner monster' and lead a writer's life spurs her epic literary journey exploring the figure of the so-called "weird" woman: the witch, the mother, the feminist. Hagood's text spills gloriously from topic to topic, weaving together a hybrid narrative that rejects both genre and the idea that the mother and art monster cannot co-exist. Bold, smart, and wildly endearing, Weird Girls is a must-read for women who feel like the world can't contain them—and for those who love them."

—Patricia Grisafi, author of Breaking Down Plath

"In Weird Girls, Caroline Hagood assembles the ultimate dream dinner party: a pantheon of brilliant, iconic, genre-defying, and game-changing women artists through time and across discipline. In sharp and spirited prose, Hagood discusses the lives and work of these artists as a means to interrogate gendered ideas of creative genius. Using elements of memoir, manifesto, and attentive close reading, Weird Girls is rich with insights that, in their jewel-like shimmering, light the path for discoveries of our own."

—Mary-Kim Arnold, author of Litany for the Long Moment and The Fish & the Dove

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Feminism, Essays, Art, Writing

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2022

About the author

Caroline Hagood is the author of the poetry books, Lunatic Speaks (FutureCycle Press, 2012), Death and Other Speculative Fictions: An Essay in Prose Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), and Making Maxine’s Baby (Hanging Loose Press, 2015); the creative nonfiction books, Ways of Looking at a Woman (Hanging Loose Press, 2019) and Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022); and the novels, Ghosts of America (Hanging Loose Press, 2021) and Filthy Creation (MadHat Press 2023).

Her speculative memoir, Goblin Mode, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project on September 2, 2025. Her book, Women of Fantasy in Their Own Words: Conversations with Contemporary Authors, edited with Sébastien Doubinsky, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in December 2025.


Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle.

Reviews

[Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There’s nothing a woman can do that threatens the world more than marching outside the lines of definition. There’s a reason they used to mark the unknown land in ancient maps with a very telling text, ‘Here There Be Monsters.’”

***

“Forget Mars; the inside of a woman is the most gorgeous and frightening place in this whole universe and its anger, poignance, and possibility.”

From Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster by Caroline Hagood

***

There is a moment in Caroline Hagood’s latest book, Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (2022), where I quickly noted the quotation and wrote beside it, “my soul mate!” Here’s the quotation: “If other kids wanted princesses, I wanted monsters.”

I thought I wasn’t going to receive this book until November (I preordered) but, lo and behold, it arrived yesterday…and I promptly started reading it on my couch and finished it in one sitting. It is that engrossing. Caroline Hagood, who has published a novel, poetry collections, and an essay collection—among other things—has done it again in her brilliantly sharp writing. She has merged literary scholarship, personal essay, irreverent observations (the best!), poetic language, feminism, film studies, and the craft of creation (but wait, there’s more!) in this Frankensteinian creature of a hybrid text. She describes her writing style as “memoir as glimpsed in a fun house mirror. I leave little traces of who I am for you to parse apart. This is how I keep myself safe from predators.” This feels more than apt: it’s perfect. The whole time we’re reading, we lean in close to listen to her secrets spilling. Sometimes, they spill as poetry from ruby-red lips of a luring siren; other times, they spill as warnings from the sliced bowels of some inner-demon of eldritch creation. I kept thinking of one of my favorite Djuna Barnes quotations (an excerpt from Nightwood I keep written on a Post-It Note stuck to my desk): “Sometimes one meets a woman who is a beast turning human.” Sometimes, one meets a woman who is a beast becoming a writer. And vice versa.

In many ways, too, Hagood is, unabashedly and deliciously, “building a coven,” to borrow her words. She is inviting women and outsiders to attach themselves to her with their (supposed) monstrosity and their maternal instincts and their strangeness and they’re inability to fit anywhere. Fluidly, she moves from discussing the witches of Oz to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to raising two children in New York City to unspecified trauma to stand-up comedy to addiction to Lady Gaga to confessional female poets to the Fates to U.S. First Ladies to Macbeth’s Weird Sisters to…well, you see where I’m (or she is) going with this. Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster is all about suturing together meaning only to undrape it to reveal another meaning lurking beneath. And then, if you turn sideways or upside down, you find another meaning. And it's all relevant to The Writer, that “art monster” who is not the typical white, hetero male at work at his Great American novel but, rather, a woman attentive to daily nuances that are more loaded than a cannon and oddly louder due to their silences. With humor, wit, and some cheek, Hagood’s work exposes the art of creation as something messy and vital, and mythic in unexpected ways.

If, as Hagood stresses, “to learn and create in profound ways, you need hybridity,” Weird Girls is here to keep us learning and creating. We are large and contain multitudes and so does this smart and provocative book. Now, go devour it like the greedy little ravenous bibliophilic monsters you are. Read all the books she mentions. Watch the films addressed. Go out and view the world as if you’re hanging upside down or standing beside yourself or living in some stranger’s body or a hybrid being like a centaur. And, then, write about it. Because those are the kinds of stories and ideas I want to read. I’m pretty sure Caroline Hagood does, too!

[Kirsten]

found this in the library felt like reading my notes app for 150 pages

[Sof · Rating 4 out of 5]

so brilliant, full of luminous and self-reflexive prose, crystallizing all the fury and longing and ugly feelings of being unable to square your socialization as a girl/femininity with the mythologized idea of the “art monster”

[Ed Renehan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've just the galley for this superb book. .... Hagood's take on the "art monster" power within women is both stunningly relevant and stunningly eloquent. While embracing that power as it manifests within herself and others, she at the same time delves deep into myth, contemporary culture, and history to untangle not only its roots, but its branches. Highly recommended.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beginning of this book is just on fire with amazing observations about the Wicked Witch of the West. And the rest never quite reaches the same heights. But this book is pitched straight at me as a reader and I quite enjoyed the idea of being mother and monster at once.

[D.J. Desmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A full view of modern feminism, along with a dismantling of the endless trend of teaching women that they are “monsters”.

I was especially into the part about female comedians, and the part about The Little Mermaid. It’s a story seen by every small girl, and the message it sends is to sacrifice your inner beauty and uniqueness to fit into the desires of men. She spends all movie showing how beautiful it is to be a mermaid, only to end with the message that all of that is worth sacrificing. This book thankfully reminds us that it’s not worth it. Keep your damn vocal chords.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are men, on the whole, better writers than women? Do they hold the exclusive honor of presenting Ideas, whereas women subsist on supporting greatness and its progeny while presenting merely themselves? Indeed is Good Writing that which pulls you from the swamp or that which tosses you right in? Is a Good Essay a “slice of living thought that reflects on its own thinking and being” cut from a loaf that “examines the structure of thinking and being itself”? Does Good Writing in the form of a Good Essay impel you to “give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them”? If you classify memoir as a glimpse in a fun house mirror—one that is necessary though anything but fun—if what speaks to you, brain-wise, in your reading are the fortuitous revelations of literary self-trepanation, dissection and display, if you clamor for writing that “amounts to an opening of the head by way of knife and placing the brain matter on the page,” if you self-identify as your own horror movie, check out Caroline Hagood’s Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster, a literary homage to and manifesto from the Woman Artist or Artist Mother or Woman-Artist-Mother or fellow human seeking to make art in order to render our ineluctable, filthy, unpretty suffering creative, perhaps even useful, perhaps beautiful, or beautifully grotesque, or grotesquely beautiful at last. Is the art monster the creator, the creation or a fusion thereof? Join Hagood in the swamp to learn from someone who’s been there and is not afraid to get existentially messy. Like much of the writing that Hagood admires, Weird Girls offers a dissecting knife, the words that say the things, and reflections from mirrors of quotidian and carnivalesque varieties alike, as well as polyvalent “insight into the significance of women’s lives and the life of signification itself.”

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Weird Girls" is an extremely interesting and clever memoir/feminist manifesto book about writing as a woman and the implications of creativity within a patriarchal society. More focused on the image of the self and the dichotomy of motherhpood/monsterhood than on the direct social or political implications of being a woamn writer, "Weird Girls" gives an insightful and nuanced (albeit radical) vision of the psychological aspects of choosing the creative path on the feminine side. Reminding us that the "monster" is always in the eye of the beholder, it also makes us, the male counterparts, reflect on the privileges we are born into, and which, actually, might limit our creativity. Comfort is always a trap, but discomfort brings resistance and creativity, even if it's also a rather high price to pay. A must read for all writers and readers concerned with the questions of identities, when they are linked with a creative challenge. Respect.

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a succinct and successful tour de force from a new and brilliant mind. This book elucidates so many of the pressures that women writers/artists face, especially when they want to be monstrous. Hagood is clearly very well-read, pulling from sources as disparate as Hegel, Freud, Melissa Febos, Jenny Offill, and Ali Wong. She's also in conversation with Claire Dederer- although this book came out before Dederer's- similar in topic but different in philosophical approach, and in the conclusions it draws, I think. I would absolutely recommend this to women who worry about using their voice fully in writing. It's a quick and approachable read that's packed with theory when you dig in. I will say that it could use a copyeditor- but such is the tradeoff of small presses- often producing more daring work, but with a bit less quality control.

[Sam Funk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really strongly feel neutral about this read. In some ways, it was a critique of previous works and iconic authors writing by monstrous authors like Mary Shelley. I feel like it lacked the fat perspective and the monster archetype that is pervasive to fat femme bodies. That would have made this text more interesting and it would help give it more of a focus. I appreciated this book's charm!

[Rebecca Beardsall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so happy I found this book when I did. It has been so meaningful as I embrace my art and acknowledge myself in this space.

[Erika · Rating 1 out of 5]

This did not work for me.