Bad girl heroine: books trend 2014

Caitlin Moran, Lena Dunham and other writers on women behaving badly are tearing up the rule book for 'girlitude', writes Laura Tennant

Being a girl has never been straightforward. That’s why every generation produces its own set texts for womanhood – part instruction manual, part wail of despair. I had Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Rules (a ticking biological clock came free with every copy); girls a decade younger got the shopping and screwing of Sex and the City; and in the Noughties there was the semi-pornographic Belle de Jour and Girl with a One-Track Mind . 

2014 book trends, however, mark something different altogether. Women writers are still writing on  girlitude. Credit goes to Emma Tennant, author of Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50's and 60's (1999) who first coined the phrase that united this army of authors. Said army   are, however, chucking the ‘how-to’ cribsheet out altogether. To hear this lot talk, failing at being a girl might not be such a bad thing after all.  

Literature's women are behaving badly

Books published in July 2014, for example, will include  Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl , while Not that Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham’s collection of essays , will be published in the US this September, 2014. The Telegraph’s columnist Bryony Gordon's memoir, The Wrong Knickers , comes hard on the heels of two fictional accounts of twenty something females, Zoe Pilger’s Eat My Heart Out and Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals . Even Eimear McBride’s prize-winning work of experimental fiction, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing , is almost a female take on Joyce's ‘ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ’ in its meditation on the constraints on female freedom in a Catholic society. 

Books on Sex, drugs and rock and roll

What do they have in common? Most strikingly, the type of no-holds-barred, heading for hell in a hand basket material (booze, drugs, catastrophic one-night stands, serious, terminal fucked-upness which isn’t cute or endearing in any way) that makes Bridget Jones look positively nun-like. This is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Martin Amis’s Money , with women doing the substance-abusing. 

Then there’s the total disregard for anything that could possibly be described as ladylike. If Caitlin Moran’s new book  is anything like as autobiographical as previews suggest, jokes about masturbation, periods and poo will feature heavily; in fact her entire oeuvre is a joyous rejection of the diktats of femininity, which lay down, among many other things, that one must be ‘fragrant’ and appealing to the opposite sex at all times. 

Lena Dunham has followed up the global domination of her TV series 'Girls' with a collection of essays which apparently passes on the wisdom gleaned from her many ‘mis-steps’. Ironically, what made Girls such compulsive and also infuriating viewing was just how bad they all were at it (being girls, that is). For someone of my age, it felt like they were letting the side down, somehow. Didn’t they know that female power, such as it is, consists in being the unattainable object of desire for as long as your own raging hormones allow, and that when you meet a gorgeous doctor with a brownstone you don’t go into a needy midnight meltdown about your issues? 

How to be a woman: breaking the rules

But of course, seeing what happens when you do everything you’re not supposed to do is half the fun. Anne-Marie, the heroine of Zoe Pilger’s brilliant, funny and subversive novel is ‘failing at being a woman to achieve a kind of freedom,’ Pilger tells me. ‘She’s disorderly and chaotic, but that is her rebellion against the lies about what a woman should be she sees all around her.’

Some reviewers have found her dislikeable, continues Pilger, ‘but for me she is the grotesque embodiment, a sort of parody, of every man’s nightmare. Her behaviour is the opposite of the extreme feminine passivity we’re supposed to cultivate to catch a man. It was great fun for me to write her because it felt like I was acting out in fiction what is prohibited in life. She’s really my alter ego.’

In her memoir The Wrong Knickers: A Decade of Chaos , Bryony Gordon writes with ruthless candour about her life as a struggling single girl in London, allowing unsuitable men to snort cocaine off her breasts (the ‘best tits in London’) while surviving on crisps and the warm white wine you get at book launches and private views. In Gordon’s case, screwing up in the all the ways that nice girls are not supposed to resulted in marriage and a 14-month old baby – an outcome which proves that in real life, rules are there to be broken. 

Having a serious drink problem is another dirty little secret that women are not supposed to confess to (when men drink, Hemingway-style, it’s tragic and romantic; when women do it, it’s tragic and embarrassing). Well, meet Laura and Tyler, the drinking buddies careening through Manchester in Emma Jane Unsworth’s novel Animals . The opening scene, in which the friends nurse a hangover with more booze, sets the tone for the rest of the novel: ‘The first rule of intoxication was company. Do it together and you have a party; do it alone and you have a problem.’

Unsworth, wrote one reviewer, ‘is brilliantly scathing about the pressures on women to “behave”, and Laura and Tyler spend much of the book raging against these expectations.’ The escape supplied by the drink and drugs is never, of course, an actual solution to the pressures of being a grown woman; but you have to take off your hat to Tyler and Laura for the fearlessness and fury with which they medicate themselves into oblivion. 

"Femininity is a social construct": An end to faking it

It’s often remarked that femininity is socially constructed, something women put on before they leave the house the way a drag queen would put on a wig, lashes and false boobs. Germaine Greer wrote about it in The Female Eunuch : ‘Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex.’

Deciding you are ‘sick of the masquerade’ and that you’re going to play by a different set of rules, or no rules at all, may be the defining characteristic of new-gen writing about girls. 

Hedonistic amorality, of course, is a path already well-worn by male writers, points out Zoe Strimpel , a writer on relationships who is now doing a PhD at Sussex on dating culture since 1970. ‘I always read the Martin Amis and Phillip Roths of the world and marvelled at the sheer male-centric world view – the shameless exploration of sexual exploits and bodily and moral irreverence; the callousness of a Keith Talent, a John Money, a Mickey Sabbath, an Alexander Portnoy,’ she muses. ‘I felt it was odd that women consumed this literature but men rarely read its female equivalent. It seems these books might be answering to that imbalance – if only men will read them.’

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