Life, friends, is boring.
I’ve just about always liked to read books about boredom: as shallow discontent, as profound spiritual suffering, and especially boredom with no concrete cause and no logical solution. I’ve gathered prize lists of books in my journals, grouping and collecting titles that might not typically fit together, and one of my most precious — one of my longest — is the list of women’s depression, isolation, and disillusionment. In other words, a list of books about women’s boredom.
I began this list, without knowing it, after reading Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays in my high school English class and identifying with Maria’s resignation as she went through a divorce, particularly as she drove the Los Angeles freeways: I had, just a year earlier, gotten my license, and spent hours on the city’s long stretches of uninterrupted pavement, which meant seeking out either the freeways or the Palos Verdes or Malibu hills. I would put on melancholy playlists—Manchester Orchestra, Grouper, Sharon Van Etten—and tell my mom I was going to a friend’s house. I took her Toyota Camry and drove at night, after rush hour, but was always home by eleven (the city curfew for minors in the first year after getting their license). It offered a dramatic backdrop to my sadness. Living in Los Angeles felt like standing at the edge of one big cliff, and I had near-constant vertigo. There was something in this story that resonated with me, that I saw as indicative of, if not my direct experience, one I understood and sympathized with. Mostly, I just liked that Maria also drove the freeways.
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There’s “sad girl literature,” the “literary it girl,” the “unlikable female narrator.” Online commentators repeatedly categorize types of girls and package them up for readership, generating sensationalism around the “feminine mystique” of books written by women. Not that boyhood is immune to similar labels (lest we forget sadboys, fuckboys, chads). Still, more keyboards have been worn out clacking about these supposedly new types of literary women.
Listicles call the literary “sad girl” a “woman who doesn’t wash, who bleeds and talks about bowel movements and the most disgusting parts of sex and their bodies, who smokes and isn’t ashamed to wallow in their filth.” “Sad Girl Lit has Hijacked the Summer,” another article declared, defining the sad girl as “the sexually available, waifish heroine whose mental health problems are their whole personality.” The “sad girl” subgenre nods to Sylvia Plath and Jean Rhys as their literary predecessors, though Dazed cited Lynne Tillman as the “godmother of sad girl literature.” The volume and vagaries of this commentary have provoked weariness, with arguments that she is just “another sexy sob story,” that these women don’t have much in common, or that the sad girl is just a complex woman. This eye-rolling isn’t misplaced: the label trivializes these books and relegates them to “women’s literature,” all the while reducing women’s coming-of-age novels to one theme, defined in vague, varying terms.
The subgenre was first identified in Leslie Jamison’s essay Cult of the Literary Sad Woman. But as quickly as Jamison coins the trope, she refuses sadness as something worthy of investigation. She considers it sophomoric, a theme for the young and “terminally hip.” Writing five years before her, Roxane Gay took an interest in unlikeable female narrators, defining them not too differently from the sad girl: “those who behave in socially unacceptable ways and say whatever is on their mind and do what they want with varying levels of regard for the consequences.” “When women are unlikable,” Gay presaged, “it becomes a point of obsession in critical conversations by professional and amateur critics alike.” The “sad girl” and the “unlikeable woman” embody resistance to the constraints of traditional femininity, each refusing to conform to gendered expectations that they find stifling or absurd. While Gay’s unlikeable female narrator openly rebels against these norms and unapologetically embraces her unlikeability, the sad girl exposes the emotional toll of this rebellion—the exhaustion, alienation, and despair that arise from struggling to fit an unattainable mold. Although they are often dismissed or sensationalized, these figures stand in a long tradition of female characters who, for one reason or another, cannot embrace traditional womanhood.
The “sad girl” is an offshoot of an archetype that echoes across literary history, and has only recently been repackaged for contemporary readers. The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) was an early venture in feminist criticism making a point to study literature about women who are mad or have gone insane: “Over and over again they project what seems to be the energy of their own despair into passionate, even melodramatic characters.” Serious art has been made out of this subject—the madwoman—since antiquity. From Medea and Medusa to Ophelia, madness takes on different forms: for Ophelia, it manifests in its effeminate (read passive) form of ennui, while for Medea and Medusa, it becomes a masculine-coded (active) expression of rage.1 See Robert Harrison and Maria Massucco’s discussion in the Entitled Opinions episode “Women and Madness,” https://entitled-opinions.com/2023/10/19/women-and-madness/.
The seventies were invested in feminine writing: this decade saw Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in which she called upon women to write themselves into literature: “Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity.” Adrienne Rich, too, published poems imploring solidarity between women writers: “No one lives in this room / without living through some kind of crisis . . . without contemplating last and late / the true nature of poetry. The drive / to connect. The dream of a common language.” With the rise of postcolonial studies, African American studies, and poststructuralism, the ’70s investment in the idea of a cohesive “female writer” fell out of fashion.
While I do believe in a female literary tradition and womanhood as a genuine locus of meaning, I also feel a certain hesitance in furthering the discourse on literary madwomen: women’s literature should not be reduced to a monolithic plot, nor should all women’s problems be ascribed to a single origin. Still, George Eliot declared that the “woman question” appeared “to overhang abysses, of which even prostitution is not the worst.” Virginia Woolf, reflecting on what her husband saw as the “melancholy philosophy” of Night and Day, defended the book in her diary: “If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy?” Charlotte Bronte, openly concerned with women’s inequality, thought there were “evils—deep-rooted in the foundation of the social system—which no efforts of ours can touch: of which we cannot complain; of which it is advisable not too often to think.” And it was Cixous, too, who wrote, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
The “sad girl” genre has reanimated the monolithic ethos of the ’70s, while a contemporary fear of being reductive makes it tricky to discuss writing about women’s madness. “Sad girl” is a mushy term: her definitions drift in and out of each other as though every book about a sad girl were the same thing, as if all ennui could be reduced to one experience. Depictions of women’s madness in literature are diverse, to the point that it’s hard to cluster the narratives under one umbrella. If, as Elena Ferrante argues, women “conjure up this mad creature” to come to terms with their “sense of the discrepancies between what they are and what they are supposed to be,” why would the canon have only one generalizing term for what must be a variety of narrators, expectations, and identities? The women I know—in my life and in literature—do not share a single, common problem.
Instead of contributing to the mushy generalizations surrounding this subgenre, I’ll focus on the disinterest and detachment that surfaces in some of my favorite books written by women, which feature characters I’ve come to think of as the “bored women.” These women may not quite experience madness, but they exude a palpable lethargy due to feeling trapped by their circumstances (the masculine term might be “impotent”). Characters or narrators are classified as “bored women,” broadly, if they are dissatisfied with their lives and desire something else. But what makes all these women feel trapped is different, and sometimes contradictory. I want to study some books born from the female imagination, reading them not separately, as they often are, but in the context of the canon of bored women, unearthing new insights and meanings from this juxtaposition. I want to understand why they are bored, and why “sad girl” doesn’t cut it: to examine the particular conditions that foster this state of boredom, to uncover what their dissatisfaction reveals about women’s lives, and to show that although a throughline does exist, it’s difficult to lump these stories together. These books are Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, Annie Ernaux’s A Frozen Woman, Eileen Chang’s The Golden Cangue, Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night, and Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation.
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Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment (2002) is the story of the psychological unraveling of Olga following her sudden abandonment by a husband of fifteen years. The novel can be divided into three parts: in the first section, Olga learns that her husband is leaving her. She finds herself becoming a “poverella,” a poor woman, akin to a neighbor she once pitied: “The woman lost everything, even her name (perhaps it was Emilia), for everyone she became the ‘poverella,’ that poor woman, when we spoke of her that was what we called her.”2 Elena Ferrante. The Days of Abandonment. New York: Europa Editions, 2005, 9. Olga’s greatest fear is not losing her husband or her children, but joining a lineage of pitiful women.
The second and central part of the novel begins the morning Olga learns that both the dog and her son are sick, the phone is disconnected, and she cannot unlock the front door to her apartment. Her grip on reality loosens in a day, symbolizing the disintegration of her temporal awareness—represented, in part, by this day absorbing nearly a third of the novel.
Give back to me a sense of proportion. What was I? A woman worn out by four months of tension and grief; not, surely, a witch who, out of desperation, secretes a poison that can give a fever to her male child, kill a domestic animal, put a telephone line out of order, ruin the mechanism of a reinforced door lock. And hurry up. The children hadn’t eaten anything. I myself still had to have breakfast, wash. The hours were passing. I had to separate the dark clothes from the white. I had no more clean underwear. The vomit-stained sheets. Run the vacuum. Housecleaning.3 Days of Abandonment, 100.
Months into her abandonment, she is overwhelmed by housework, the burden of being a single mother, worn out by “tension and grief” and the fear that she is not an adequate caretaker. Her inability to avoid becoming a poverella is the thrust of her shame, and, for most of the novel, the thrust of the narrative. The day continues on implacably, and her dog dies. This may be the great battle with ennui: the wish that time would speed up, just for us.
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This is not unlike Annie Ernaux’s A Frozen Woman (1981), an autobiographical account of the unhappiness in the author’s first marriage. Ernaux wrote the book while she was still married to her husband, and documented both her second-class status as his wife and the ways she could have anticipated her freedom would diminish after the wedding—as her teacher said, a woman’s greatest destiny is to push a baby carriage.4 Annie Ernaux. A Frozen Woman. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995, 45. “Boys are free to desire, not you my girl, resist, that’s the code,”5 A Frozen Woman, 56. she writes. The question of desire remains central to these stories: that they are often thwarted, or impossible to attain, resulting in the narrator’s boredom, due to her inability to chase her desire.
Ernaux, above all else, wants to be a writer. Instead, she becomes weighed down by housework—and then two children—while her husband studies for his teacher’s license. “Somewhere in the wardrobe lie some short stories; he has read them, not bad, you should keep at it,” she writes. “Of course he encourages me, and hopes that I’ll get my teacher’s diploma, that I’ll ‘fulfill’ myself, like him.”6 A Frozen Woman, 77. Unlike Olga, it is not the abandonment by the husband that leads to Ernaux’s unraveling, but the imposition of marriage that leaves her no choice but to abandon her dream. They move to Annecy, where she is taken away from her family, left entirely alone with the responsibilities of housekeeping.
I live the difference between him and me day after day, floundering in this shrunken woman’s world, choking on petty tasks and problems. Awash in loneliness. I become the guardian of the hearth, in charge of supplies and maintenance. What had come before was a picnic. Annecy, the ultimate apprenticeship in the role. Years of just the basics, without any of those comforts that help you bear up: a grandmother to babysit, parents who get you out of the kitchen every once in a while with a little dinner invitation, or enough money to pay for a cleaning lady or a mother’s helper. Me, I have nothing beyond the essentials: a husband, a baby, an apartment—enough to discover the difference between the two of us in its pure state. The words “house,” “food,” “education,” “work” no longer have the same meaning for him and for me. 7 A Frozen Woman, 86–87.
Beyond Cixous, there were Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Sarah Kofman. These French writers revisited texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and demonstrated how symptomatic books about so-called hysterical women—Madame Bovary, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria—were of their cultural context (hysteria being a “female disease” popularized by Freud). Their emphatic belief was that stories have a concrete impact on the lives of real people, especially given the weight archetypes carry. They were interested in what art left unsaid, what it quietly subjugated women to. “A woman who gets involved with truth, with solving riddles, is a ‘degenerate’ woman, reactive and hysterical,” wrote Kofman.
Ernaux, coming into her own during the height of French feminist theory, invests herself in this question of art versus life, and the ways the two mutually reinforce each other even if they remain distinct universes. While her labor as a housewife was made invisible, she engaged in the visible labor of writing and selling a book without her husband’s knowledge, reasserting herself as an active agent in her life, and enacting the ideals championed by the French feminists. “Individualism is full of shit,” she says, recognizing that she must maintain her husband’s independence above all else. She rejects her duty to serve as a mother and wife, this male conception of freedom:
Life, the beauty of the world. Everything is outside of me. There is nothing more to discover. . . Any talk about feeling trapped, stifled, immediately arouses suspicions—another one who thinks only of herself. If you are unmoved by the grandeur of this duty, to witness the awakening of a child (your own son, madame!), to nourish him, protect him, guide his first steps, answer his first questions (the voice should rise higher and higher, then slam down like the blade of a guillotine), then you should never have had a child.8 A Frozen Woman, 93.
It is quite a radical book: to reject the domestic, to rail against the feminine traits of sacrifice and selflessness, in a work so blatantly based on one’s life. In a talk at Albertine in 2022, Ernaux said that she is able to write so shamelessly only by imagining a separate person whose story she tells. She attributes this distance to having crossed class lines: she is forever cut off from her past self. As part of the post-war working class, she had a little more savings, and opportunities for education, than her parents. She was the first in her family to have enough of an economic surplus to write novels, and used that to confront and relinquish her past.
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Compare this with Eileen Chang: born into a distinguished Shanghai family when China was recovering from the collapse of the Qing dynasty, ending thousands of years of imperial rule. The country was racked by decades of civil war, disrupted trade, droughts, floods, famine, and hyperinflation. Even there, especially there, as a result of that structure, Chang wrote a woman dissolving into dissipation. If the boredom in A Frozen Woman is a political rejection of a husband’s freedom at the cost of her own, Chang’s is the irrepressible rebellion of an embittered individual against social convention. The Golden Cangue (1943) is a comfortless vision of existence. Although it again tells the story of a woman’s abject status within the family structure, she is portrayed not as a heroine, but as a villain who ruins her children’s lives.
Ch’i’ch’iao, the daughter of a sesame oil shopkeeper, is bound by marriage to a wealthy, blind, and paralyzed man. Chang’s narrative comprises two parts: her early status as a newcomer, and her later years as a widow. As a mother, Ch’i’ch’iao abuses and manipulates her children: she binds her daughter’s feet, even though it’s an archaic practice, and shoos away all her daughter’s potential suitors until the girl misses her window of opportunity to marry. The son is allowed to do whatever he wants, including taking prostitutes. She introduces the two of them to opium in a misguided attempt to “take their mind off things,” and all three of them become addicted.
Ch’i’ch’iao gave [her son] a slave girl called Chüan-erh for a concubine and still could not hold him. She also tried in various ways to get him to smoke opium. Ch’an-pai had always liked a couple of puffs for fun but he had never got into the habit. Now that he smoked more he quieted down and no longer went out much, just stayed with his mother and his new concubine.
His sister Ch’ang-an got dysentery when she was twenty-four. Instead of getting a doctor, Ch’i’ch’iao persuaded her to smoke a little opium and it did ease the pain. After she recovered she also got into the habit. An unmarried girl without any other distractions, Ch’ang-an went at it singlemindedly and smoked even more than her brother.9 Eileen Chang. Love in a Fallen City. Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury and Eileen Chang. New York: New York Review Books, 2007, 217.
Ch’i’ch’iao doesn’t want her daughter to suffer the same fate of a bad marriage, knowing the wealthy family only chose her to marry their son because he had no better prospects. But in trying to give her children freedoms she never had, she enables generational dysfunction. Through the nineteenth century, boredom was linked to moral failure and thought to be remedied by mental discipline; the twentieth century painted a bleaker picture, considering it an appropriate response to uncontrollable circumstances. It was conceived of as suffering from too much inner knowledge. For modernist women, as for Chang, boredom was a tool used to demand that they be recognized as individuals. Individualism promised desire and purpose: they were intertwined with what it meant to be modern. The persistence of women’s boredom ran contrary to typical individualism. It was not only Chang, but also May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf—all use boredom to express doubt that a woman can forge her own path.10 For more on this see Alison Pease’s “Boredom and Individualism in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out” in Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom.
Ch’i’ch’iao, after being taken advantage of by her in-laws for years, copes by beating the servants and her daughter, lying inside all day, and smoking opium. Refused the ability to enact her desires and relegated to the demanding domestic care for a strange family, Ch’i’ch’iao passes her suffering on to her children. The Golden Cangue, like Days of Abandonment, presents a moral side of the bored woman’s despondency: after these women are thwarted by their husbands, they let their children get caught in the crossfire. Ferrante forgets to pick them up from school, and Ch’i’ch’iao ruins their futures. Boredom is presented as degenerating and turns them into hollow, empty shells, no more than in The Golden Cangue. While the book is a critique of the marriage system, Ch’i’ch’iao is no hero.
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Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954), on the other hand, makes fun of this literary tradition. Here, fleeing a life of boredom becomes a focused intent, to the point that the narrator accidentally kills her father’s fiance to get what she wants. Cécile, a listless seventeen-year-old, cherishes her languorous days with her father. He has no intellectual interests and does not force her to study, even though she has just failed the school year. They spend the summer on the beach, where Cécile is glad to be idle:
I lay stretched out on the sand, took up a handful and let it run through my fingers in soft, yellow streams. I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts, for it was summer.11 Françoise Sagan. Bonjour Tristesse. Translated by Irene Ash. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004, 7.
Cécile has a captivating indifference to received behavior, which is upended when her father begins a romantic relationship—and then quickly engages—an old friend, Anne. Cécile, who has always admired Anne’s bourgeois demeanor, realizes that this woman will now force her to study. She cannot take this: she visualizes “a life of degradation and moral turpitude as [her] ideal.”12 Bonjour Tristesse, 20. She learns to hate Anne, claiming her imposition of morality “kept me from liking myself” as a girl “naturally meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced by her into self-criticism and a guilty conscience.”13 Bonjour Tristesse, 52. She spirals in her room, unable to confront her ennui when she should be studying:
It was very hot. I kept my room in semidarkness with the shutters closed, but even so the air was unbearably heavy and damp. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, moving only to search for a cooler place on the sheet. I could not sleep. Frequently I played records on the phonograph at the foot of my bed. I chose slow rhythms, without a melody. I smoked a good deal and felt decadent, which gave me pleasure. But I was not deluded by this game of pretense: I was sad and bewildered.14 Bonjour Tristesse, 64.
She valorizes Oscar Wilde and the Decadents, wanting to be idle in an explicitly pro-leisure aesthetic. Confronted with the prospect of discipline and work, Cécile retreats into her room, shunning the sunlight, losing weight, and lamenting the loss of pleasure in her life. Cécile devises a plan to separate her father and Anne, culminating in Anne’s accidental death. Cécile blames this misfortune not on her hatred, but “inertia, the sun.”15 Bonjour Tristesse, 77. In other words, Anne dies because Cécile is bored:
In the turmoil of our disorderly Paris flat, sometimes forlorn, at others full of flowers, the stage of many and varied scenes, often cluttered with luggage, I somehow could not envisage the introduction of order, the peace and quiet, the feeling of harmony that Anne brought with her everywhere, as if they were the most precious of gifts. I dreaded being bored to death. . . . I feared boredom and tranquility more than anything else. In order to achieve inner peace, my father and I had to have excitement. And this Anne was not prepared to admit.16 Bonjour Tristesse, 111.
Bonjour Tristesse is another instance of a woman putting life into art by publishing a book. While Ernaux’s is an unfiltered account of her first marriage, Francoise Sagan lived out Cécile’s dreams of a life of excess: she indulged in whiskey, cocaine, and heroin; developed a gambling addiction; and left debts upon her death of around €1m. Chang’s father was an opium addict who kept a concubine and brutally beat his daughter, even locking her in her room for a six-month period, where she contracted dysentery and suffered hallucinations. These stories of women’s thwarted desire are not pulled from a fictional world, but are representations, if distortions, of their own struggle for self-sovereignty (Ferrante, of course, evades this vein of analysis by writing under a pen name).
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Where the books up to this point have largely been indictments of the limitations imposed by women’s roles at various moments in history, Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night (2011) follows a modern woman with the freedom to work as a single copywriter, who is still bored. At thirty-four, Fuyuko Irie is a proofreader in Tokyo, leading a monotonous existence with no real friends, hobbies, or partner. The order of days in her life could be drastically shuffled without consequence.
I flipped through the calendar to December and looked at the picture of a snowy Christmas tree, then went back to April before flipping back to December again. It goes without saying, but that was as far as the calendar went. Apart from a few deadlines marked lightly in pencil, I had no plans whatsoever. It crossed my mind that I would probably never notice if the previous six months and the six months to follow had been switched around.
I made some food, ate it, washed the dishes, then returned to my work. Without taking a break, I reached the number of pages I had said that I would not exceed on a given day, so I turned off my desk light and did some stretches.17 Mieko Kawakami. All the Lovers in the Night. Translated by Sam Bett. New York: Europa Editions, 2022, 25.
Fuyuko attempts to fill her hours with work, incorporating stretches and domestic chores, projecting her internal ennui onto the canvas of her mundane existence. She drinks to help the evenings pass, opening bottles of sake after stretching. One night, she hits the back of her skull against the floor until she falls asleep. Time becomes meaningless because Fuyoko remains the same: her life is lived in long repetitive rhythms, suggesting that large, life-changing events are necessary to add texture. “Proofreading is a lonely business, full of lonely people,” a colleague says.18 All the Lovers, 27.
Because proofing is all she has to show for her life, it becomes a source of immense pressure. Discovering a typo in her book plunges her into a depressive state, leaving her “feeling bewildered, as if whatever strength I’d managed to build up had been smashed to pieces.”19 All the Lovers, 77. Like Ernaux, she wants to do creative work. But while for Ernaux a job would allow her to be an artist, it’s Fuyuko’s day job that prevents her from being one. When she sees a friend from high school for the first time in fifteen years, the recognition that people she once knew have married or passed away makes her acutely aware of her own isolation:
I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realized how alone I truly was. Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and limitless supply of sounds and colors packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch. Nothing that would call my name. There never had been, and there never would be. And that would never change, no matter where I went in the world. Surrounded by the grayness of the city, ever grayer in the misty rain, I was unable to move.20 All the Lovers, 155.
There’s an implicit throughline in these novels that becomes apparent in reading Kawakami: each narrator lacks a significant female friendship. No one has a confidant, someone who might save them if given the chance, either by helping with the housework, or just providing a kind ear. Instead, there is a repeated importance of relationships with men, and the care they withhold. While Fuyuko is the only one to explicitly recognize that there is no one for her to reach out to, neither Olga, Ch’i’ch’iao, nor Ernaux have a significant relationship to balance out the one with their husband, making the terms of their marriage fraught. They depend on this man, by choice or by circumstance, to fulfill all their emotional needs. It is hard not to imagine that these stories would be different, offering a more positive view of these women’s situations, had they had someone to turn to. As it is, these novels of interiority are often dismissed as individualistic or narcissistic exercises. But by talking about isolation, these narrators are talking about people outside themselves too: the families that are impacted, the loneliness of marriage or city living. They write honestly about the repercussions of being unable to form meaningful relationships.
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Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation (2021) spells out a tragedy of isolation that interweaves so many of the themes of its predecessors. The novel captures a depressed woman’s obsession with her abusive boyfriend. (It echoes, too, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where a woman’s diaries chronicle her escape from an abusive husband.) “I could not be alone happily,” she confesses at the start of the novel, and resorts—like Didion, Chang, and Kawakami’s narrators—to excessive drinking, born “not of a desire to be drunk but to pass time less miserably.”21 Megan Nolan. Acts of Desperation. New York: Viking, 2021, 18. She enjoys the “fuzz and numbness” of her hangovers, how they make her too busy tending to her body to remember her wide-reaching unhappiness.22 Acts of Desperation, 24. She then turns to what she is really here to tell us: the circumstances that led to her rape.
If I want to say something about my hurt, I hear my voice enter the canon of Women Who’ve Been Hurt, becoming unknown, not-mine. I can’t, and don’t much want, to make myself understood. Why should I make my experience particular, and what would be the point? Should I tell you about rape? I was angry at having been made real in that way against my will. There is good reason for not living inside your body all the time, and this event trapped me back in it for a long while, until I could struggle back outside again. The functionality of it depressed me, that I was so prosaic. My body was not glorious or miraculous or alive, it was just a thing of use. This did not sadden or surprise, so much as bored me: I looked at myself, lumpen and inelegant and abused, and thought: So what.23 Acts of Desperation, 40.
Despite the gravity of the event—it is her boyfriend that assaults her—she calls it something that “bores” her. Although she is clearly preoccupied with her boyfriend and cannot bring herself to leave him, she often describes herself as bored: her boyfriend’s stories make her feel bored and hopeless, grocery shopping bores her, she talks to friends when the boredom becomes overwhelming, and she returns home when the boredom once again becomes too much.24 Acts of Desperation, 92, 116, 119, 143, 154. She’s sarcastic about the “canon of women who’ve been hurt.” She cannot find a point to making herself particular, to talking about the specifics. This is avoidant behavior: a series of rationalizations about why she doesn’t want to talk about a horrible thing that happened to her, which, in a way, she must do, in order to expurgate it. She refuses to be a victim and seems to say, “so what if I was.” This is boredom as affectation, something she intentionally cultivates. She’s not actually bored; she’s traumatized and trying to project boredom. It’s also misogynistic, implying that most women go on about their rapes, and she is better than most women. She tries to assert control by affecting boredom, treating rape like the weather. As one of the latest in this lineage of stories, this frame is devastating. It is decidedly contemporary in how it is able to capture a generation’s response to this traumatic event through constant disaffection.
Compare this with Olga, who thinks of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, ashamed that she has become as desperate as these women of literature. She calls them a “whirlpool sucking [her] in.”25 Days of Abandonment, 163. Ernaux thinks of The Second Sex, “the story of an inept and hopeless battle against dust,” and refuses to sweep in an attempt to maintain autonomy.26 A Frozen Woman, 87. Like Ferrante and Nolan, then, she weaves in literary references to express her dissatisfaction, explicitly situating her story in the literary tradition of ennui. None of them want to be reduced by these circumstances, yet feel it’s a futile fight against becoming this woman. This canon is, in part, stories of women trying not to enter this canon. But it is their fate, at least temporarily.
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Olga eventually finds a job and begins a relationship with her neighbor. She describes this period as one which returns her to “the solidity of the links that bind together spaces and times” by which the reader understands that she is departing from a tragic arc in which she would have lost all sense of reality and become a true madwoman. This structure is foreshadowed in the beginning of the second section, which anticipates Olga’s ability to reflect on her suffering: “The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn’t know it yet.”27 Days of Abandonment, 85. Her narrative perspective, which is distanced from her immediate experience, offers a vantage point for her understanding and recovery.28 Trauma Narratives, “The Interrupted Temporality of Trauma in Ferrante and Sapienza,” 215. https://www.editricesapienza.it/sites/default/files/6105_Trauma_Narratives_interior.pdf. She can only find this by walking away from the battle. Similarly, Nolan’s narrator’s last act is to ask, from the vantage point of years gone by, living in a foreign country, “What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex?” She does not condemn her sadness as infantile; she recognizes that overcoming it was one of the great challenges in her life. Ernaux, following her novel’s publication, radically rejected Western motherhood by leaving her husband to pursue her career. “That’s marriage,” Ernaux writes, “choosing between one or the other’s depression—both would be a waste.” After proofing one night, Fuyuko experiences a creative impulse that shoots through the “haze.” She grabs her notebook and begins writing “out of nowhere,” then falls asleep with the unfamiliar feeling of hope, knowing these words would be there for her in the morning. The reader can imagine that, much like Kawakami, she goes on to publish a book.
Stories of women’s sadness become tiring when they repeat in cycles of devastating loss, or abandonment, or nihilism—when nothing resolves or improves. The Ophelia-style ending doesn’t have a scope of recovery, but in not denying the experience of suffering and then making space for a narrative that centers a recuperated, dignified acknowledgement of healing, these books suggest better paths forward. They create stories departing from the negative history of women’s madness and offer resolutions to these feelings—promises of different and hopeful futures.
This leaves two books: Cécile, racked with guilt over Anne’s death, says bonjour to tristesse: “I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.”29 Bonjour Tristesse, 5. The book condemns her desire for leisure as self-centered: it was a selfish quest to enact her desires, to never be bored, and she must live with the repercussions forever.30 Bonjour Tristesse, intro viii. The end of The Golden Cangue describes Ch’i’ch’iao half asleep on the opium couch, too languid to brush away her tears: “She knew that her son and daughter hated her to the death, that the relatives on her husband’s side hated her, and that her own kinfolk also hated her.” Ch’i’ch’iao’s is a dismal story of what ennui can do to a woman—how, in her suffering, she manipulates her children without introspection and deprives them of connection.
These six stories document the psychic distress that pervades these women’s lives: abandonment, political rejection of assigned roles, rebellion against social conventions, fear of the mundane, social alienation, affecting distance after a traumatic event. These narratives are born of marriages dissolving, endless housework, forced isolation, unfulfilling jobs, and unrequited love. This is the realm the authors knew. At the same time, these books are distinct, multivariate, and complex. What makes the characters bored is different. The manifestation of boredom is different. Their desires are not singular. This is why the halfhearted definitions and listicles of “sad girl” literature leave us wanting so much more, and why ’70s criticism fell out of fashion. It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing. Any attempt inevitably falls short. But the connections, nonetheless, persist, and there’s a mad web to be woven each time we dare spin it.
Women’s explorations of boredom elicit various responses—moral and psychological repugnance, sympathy, or recognition. However and in spite of how their words are received, these authors quest to know desire, to convey what it is like to live without it. These books teach us to face our unimportance, life’s nothingness. They also show how many writers found it worthwhile to write a character unable to find “normal” human experience gratifying. An intentional deep dive into the circumstances of these singular characters helps us push back against the generalizing gesture of attaching madness, or “sad girls,” to feminine discontent and ending the story there. Each of them signal an unrealized possibility, the desire for desire. Boredom means the subject knows there must be more to be had out of this life. It’s an endemic state; the fight against ennui is an eternal one. There’s not much one can do about that. ~
