Most often a protagonist who is at times miserable and disaffected, who is suffering under capitalism, who is ambivalent about their sexual experiences and their relationships with others. Usually they are highly educated and frequently analyse their own situation.
The term sad girl novel is sometimes used interchangeably with cool girl novel, another dubious term that lambasts women for, among other things, dressing well and throwing parties.
Describing Eliza Clark's Boy Parts as sad would be like describing American Psycho as sad. When I read Natasha Brown's Assembly, I don't find sadness. I find glittering, righteous anger.
Indeed, a lot of what we're identifying vaguely as sadness, is rage. Rage – Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts. Perhaps we aren't able to identify more complex emotions, in particular those that are unpleasant, like anger, in these novels, because of our increasingly infantilised view of women authors.
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