Unhappy women in literature are by no means a novelty, but they are newly trendy. Over the last few years, there has been a surge in fiction written by female authors, centered on women in their 20s and 30s who seem unable, and sometimes reluctant, to reconcile themselves to ‘life’. Regardless of their different backgrounds and present circumstances, an elusive yet unassailable malaise has taken hold of them. The protagonists in these novels are mired in a state of unbelonging, as estranged from others as they are from themselves, always on the periphery of any group, the perpetual ‘outsider’. As they engage in dissociative and self-destructive behavior, they drift between disaffection, anhedonia, and hypersensitivity. In addition to their thematic similarities, these books share a tonal and stylistic likeness, as they are written in proses routinely described as ‘clipped’, ‘sharp’, and ‘incisive’, and characterized by a wry yet detached sense of humor, which, as Jess Bergman suggests, imbues their narratives with ‘a kind of anhedonic equanimity’. Their narratives present us with a glimpse into their ‘nominally’ adult lives, which often proceed by ‘rote’, as these young women do not so much ‘navigate’ modern life as half-heartedly drift.


I like to see this 'trend' as a subset of the The Female Malaise subgenre.
Related lists: She's Nasty: Amoral, Manipulative, and Disruptive Female Characters.


List inspired by Jess Bergman's 'I’m Not Feeling Good at All' piece where she discusses "the perplexingly alienated women of recent American fiction". According to Bergman, they tend to have boring jobs in offices, they aren't close to their family (or they have no living relatives), they are anhedonic, self-destructive, possibly masochists, the "remote avatars of contemporary malaise".

Although Bergman's piece focuses on fiction with American protagonists, this list is not solely reserved for American fiction.

If you want to add books to this list make sure that it has a fairly 'modern' setting (i'm thinking 90s onwards). DO NOT ADD "classics" such as Bell Jar or books with historical settings, thanks


Other articles discussing this subgenre/trend are:
- Lucinda Rosenfeld, ‘Heroines of Self-Hate’, The New York Times, 27 Feb 2021
- Sara Batkie, ‘2020 is the Year of the “Catastrofemale”’, Chicago Review of Books, 5 Oct 2020
- Rebecca Liu, ‘The Making Of A Millennial Woman’, Another Gaze, 12 June 2019