I came across an article that interested me this week (this is it, here – The problem with ‘Cool Girl Lit’ ) and I thought ooh what’s this?! Cool Girl Lit!
Now, as you can no doubt believe quite easily, I’ve never managed anything even approaching ‘cool’. Even in my alternative culture sub-set as a teenager, I was still one of the more awkward ones. My musical tastes are… eclectic, but not in an ironic way. I dance like someone having a heart attack whilst being tasered. My personal style has far too much of the first and none whatsoever of the second. I think about hats a lot. Food is more of a priority than you would believe. I am so far behind the curve that I can’t even see it (even with my glasses on) and, in fact, the curve I am squinting at in the far distance is likely a curve everyone else abandoned sometime in the late 90s. I am not cool and there are two main reasons for this –
I don’t really understand the concept
I don’t care
But I do care about literature so I thought maybe this could be a belated route to becoming a Cool Girl?!
There’s a lot to unpack even in the first paragraph of this article, but it’s this bit that particularly irked me –
“Women want to be seen reading Ottessa Moshfegh, Katie Kitamura, Sigrid Nunez and, of course, Sally Rooney.”
Goodness, what people (specifically women?) really worry about what they are seen to be reading? Is it like being seen in the latest celebrity-infested hotspot or carrying about some vulgarly priced trinket with the ‘right’ label stitched onto it? I mean, what if you are ‘seen to be reading’ the wrong thing? Will people throw things at me if I’m walking down the street with a Catharine Arnold under my arm? Will I be shunned if caught in possession of a Terry Pratchett?
This all seems very unlikely to me, I thought. People who like reading just… like reading. They don’t really worry about what other people think about their literary habits.
But, apparently, they do! The Cool Girls do, anyway. And so this confirms, once again, that any attempts to foray into the fold of ‘cool’ are utterly futile, on my part. And that is perfectly fine. Particularly as, reading further down the article, this whole Cool Girl Lit thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway…
“But the world is ready for a new era of female narrators “contoured by joy, pleasure, curiosity, surprise, delight”.
Yes, and quite right too. Remind you of anyone, perhaps..?
So perhaps there is a chance for me to get one over on the Cool Girls after all! Or, at least, if not me, Deputy Head Porter. Well, clearly there has never been a better time to acquaint ourselves with Old College and the eccentricities within. Forget about those self-obsessed, introspective heroines and have a little bit of fun, for a change.
Welcome to Old College. It’s quite an education.
Lucy Brazier 