Feral Girls, Rising
It’s giving main character energy — with a deliciously dark twist.
Don’t call it their villain era. Contemporary literature’s most captivating protagonists are rabid, relentless, and sometimes, unexpectedly remorseful. In the past, these fictional mad women have endured torturous ramifications for living life to its limit at the behest of the male authors imagining them. Today, female authors are reclaiming primal feminism in literature, reimagining protagonists’ messy and unhinged antics as something bigger than bad behavior. Welcome to the reckoning, feral girl protagonists have entered the chat.
Across the genre, contemporary feral girl protagonists oscillate wildly between feverish rebellion, heart-racing pleasure, exhausting apathy, and a fleeting sense of contrition. At the crux of these novels resides the question of pleasure, who gets to enjoy it, who suffers for it, and what remains after the sensation has dissolved.
There’s no judge or jury in these novels. No rubber-burning police chase or air-conditioned courtroom. The division and devastation occur internally, within the walls of main characters’ psyches. In these books, the primal scream is contained. It is quiet. It is all-consuming. It is, in a word, feminine.
“It’s about existing in spaces we’re told we shouldn’t exist in or how we behave in spaces that expect us to behave a certain way, to be a certain thing — and what if we don’t want to be that thing? What if we don’t want to behave that way? […] What if the whole world is designed to inhibit you and just to exist in it is to break some deep taboo?” Roberta, the narrator in Lara Williams’ “Supper Club” appeals to her boyfriend, disclosing the details of the women-only dining club she secretly co-founded.
In the book, the supper club resurrects food from dumpsters, breaks into shuttered spaces, cooks and dines on fantastically elaborate meals, and engages in freewheeling antics that might make even the most liberated blush. There are handmade costumes, food fights, lots of drugs, and perhaps most controversial, unapologetic weight gain.
If the book had been published in the past — and written by a male author — “Supper Club” may have concluded with Roberta suffering a heart attack or some other terrifically tragic event because of the self-exploration she and fellow supper club members probe. This was such the case in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” or “Daisy Miller” by Henry James, explains Alexandra Chasin, Associate Professor of English Literature at The New School.
But these feral girl protagonists have female authors at the helm and, as a result, are reclaiming what it means to be a mad woman in today’s culture. Spoiler: There’s a lot to be pissed about.
Shannon Devito, Senior Director of Books at Barnes & Noble agrees. “These messy, complicated [protagonists] are in a lot of ways callbacks to women in literature refusing to act the way society expects them to. You could even throw it all the way back to the messy, murderous Medea or defiant Antigone,” she says.
What’s most compelling about modern feral protagonists, though, are that the writers are giving these characters the leeway to grapple with commonplace issues, both banal and extraordinary, in a variety of ways. For example, in the popular “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh, the narrator decides to sleep away the year for hazy reasons that may include the loss of her parents, a nasty breakup, and a toxic best friend. “My hibernation was self-preservational,” the narrator confesses early in the book. “I thought it was going to save my life.”
Meanwhile, the main character in Tik Tok favorite, “Animal” by Lisa Taddeo hunts down her long-lost half-sister, after an ex-lover (also her boss) commits a very public suicide, which is simply a punctuation mark on an otherwise treacherous past. Edie, Raven Leilani’s heroine in “Luster” moves in with her married lover’s family, thereby threatening to dismantle it. To each her own.
After being raped while attending university, Roberta in “Supper Club” chooses breaking and entering and shamelessly asks for seconds (and thirds). These characters are rebelling against the institutions that betrayed them in the first place, Chasin says of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” and “Luster,” like capitalism, racial injustice, marriage, and academia.
And today’s feral girls face further obstacles to freedom: They are increasingly reliant on the systems constructed to exclude them. It’s a dilemma many real women encounter daily.
In fiction from the 17th and 18th centuries, Chasin says that there was a fascination of characters going off the grid, and what they discovered as a result. Today, the grid can fit in the palm of main characters’ hands. Today, the grid is not so easy to leave — the protagonists need it to survive, no matter the ick factor. Lucky for readers, of which there are many, this pumps up the tension and only makes the stakes these characters are willing pursue even more extreme. In contemporary feral girl literature, Chasin continues, the authors push realism to its brink, while critiquing the realist constructs by which the characters are imprisoned.
“I was thinking about this idea of egregiously leaning into an anxiety in order to reach a neutral state with it,” says Lara Williams on the inspiration for “Supper Club.” “And with food and your body — what would it mean to sate your appetite and then some? To enjoy your body, and experience your body, to push it beyond pleasure to something else to attain a sort of neutral relationship with it.”
This is, perhaps, why readers are raiding bookstores for these sorts of stories. These aren’t binary tales of Bad Girl seeks revenge, finds pleasure when the dirty work is done (though those at times can be satisfying). These characters are far more complex, and therefore, more relatable.
“By bluntly addressing a lot of internal dialogue or external challenges, these books can create a doorway that opens onto sometimes unspoken challenges,” says Devito. This may, in fact, be the driving reason of the voracious appetite for such literature, especially among millennial and Generation Z enthusiasts.
“Women are moving on from a ‘girl boss’ era of feminism that asked society to make space for them if they hustled hard and turned in good work,” says Brielle Saggese, Insights Strategist at WGSN, a trend analysis company. “But over the last few years, it feels to many like that extra space is shrinking. Politically, women’s rights and healthcare are up for grabs. Professionally, women continue to bear the brunt of pandemic job loss. Socially, new demands for women’s bodies and appearance are manufactured every day.”
And while everyday women may not be able to sleep away the year or skirt murder charges (nor should they), they can relish in complicated characters taking impossible measures to remedy societal slights. They can see themselves as Roberta who remains a voyeur in her life, achieving middling pleasure by the time the last supper club rolls around. “I always thought she’d likely go back to her boyfriend,” says Williams of Roberta’s next steps after the book’s conclusion.
They can relate to the unrelenting grief of losing a pregnancy, a parent, or partner, like the protagonists in “Luster” and “Animal.” It is the simple act of ownership of such emotions surrounding trauma, systemic abandonment, and injustice that endears readers to feral girl protagonists, warts and all.
“There is a certain edge to the books grouped in this movement that felt both unhinged yet relatable, and that contrast was (and is) exciting as a reader,” says Devito. “There is a real hunger for unapologetic and complicated female main characters, so I think publishers are seeing the appetite and feeling more confident publishing books of this ilk into the wider market. As a result, we’re getting more and more titles for people to devour.”
And while these novels and characters are humming to the tune of progress, representing the real evolution of global feminism, criminal and immoral behavior is best left to novels.
“Society often puts extra moral constraints on women, where their sexuality, their appearance, their demeanor and their actions all contribute to a ‘morality meter’ that determines their worth,” says Saggese. “Stories that show women without the need to be moral will hopefully give younger generations of women more agency to succeed, fail and try again.”
But what this work unlocks may be especially meaningful — the right to imperfection.
Feral Girl Reading List
Looking to kick off feral girl fall? Devito offers an array of recommendations, listed below.
“Her Bodies and Other Parties” – Carmen Maria Macado
“Freshwater” – Akwaeke Emezi
“Nightbitch” – Rachel Yoder
“Bunny” – Mona Awad
“A Certain Hunger” – Chelsea G. Summers
“Breast and Eggs” – Mieko Kawakami