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There’s a moment in Eliza Clark’s “Boy Parts” where the protagonist looks at herself in the mirror and says, “You’re a fucking mess.” This sentence hit me harder than I could have imagined. It felt like the author had secret access to my thoughts and my inner monologue had finally made it to print. I’ve said these words to myself more times than I care to admit in a public forum, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.
It’s no surprise that Eliza Clark’s debut novel made waves as soon as it hit shelves. Boy Parts chronicles the life of Irina, an artist who is both magnetic and monstrous. The book is disturbing, funny and utterly unflinching in its portrayal of perhaps the most unlikeable woman yet written in literature.
The women who stopped behaving
During the pandemic, I came across another book, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh. It’s one of those books that you recommend to friends and then immediately wish you hadn’t because it’s definitely not for everyone. But Moshfegh’s story has now also achieved cult status. A cornerstone of what readers today refer to as unhinged women’s literature.
When I fell down the rabbit hole Reddit discussions and BookTok threads, I realized something simple but profound: women are tired of performing. Tired of curating the versions of themselves that best fit societal expectations. Are you tired of following ten-step skincare routines, fitting into the mold of the “boss woman,” the “perfect mom,” and everything else that seems impossible for a single person to achieve?
Build a career, be successful, support your family, pursue a hobby, exercise, meditate, journal, and look perfect doing it. But whatever you do, just don’t fall apart. Because no one wants a woman to break up.
And yet, in the pages of these books, we have these characters who are unfiltered, impulsive, unpredictable, and yet fully alive in the splendor of their flaws. It’s almost as if they’re expressing the need to be performative. And perhaps that’s why more and more women seem to find solace in these completely chaotic characters.
The Rise of the Unhinged Women Trope
The growing popularity of these so-called “awkward” heroines is hard to ignore. Bookstores now have curated sections dedicated to them. Critics have attempted to name the phenomenon; some call it Femgorewhile others refer to it as the “Unhinged Women” trope. But whatever the name, one thing is certain: contemporary literature by women about troubled women is on the rise. RF Kuang’s Yellowface debuted at number 1 on the Sunday Times list. Bunny by Mona Awad was named one of the best books of 2019. My year of rest and relaxation became more and more popular over time.
Together, these novels, My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh, Bunny by Mona Awad, Boy Parts and She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark, A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G Summers, Animal by Lisa Taddeo, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, and many others, have become standard texts in the awkward girl canon. They are the books women choose in bookstores to celebrate heroines who are fierce, funny, vengeful, and breathtakingly real.
From the crazy women
But before today’s cult favorites, there was the original Crazy people in the atticthe epitome of female rage, locked away so the world wouldn’t have to witness her refusal to behave. Bertha Mason, the crazy woman in the attic from Jane Eyreis one of the most haunting characters in literature. She is the shadow self of Victorian femininity, which only got a voice many years later in Jean Rhys’ work Wide Sargasso Sea. While some critics have read Bertha Mason as Charlotte Brontë’s own repressed rage, others interpret her as Jane’s alter ego: the untamed, raw, impulsive self that the author refuses to acknowledge in her work and perhaps in herself. She is everything that Jane as a typical Victorian heroine cannot be – wild, disobedient, defiant and for that she has to be hidden and demonized from the world. As Bertha’s flames literally consume Thornfield, they also consume the ideal of the “good woman.”
A certain hunger
Like anger, hunger also becomes another theme of female rebellion in books. A Specific Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers and Butter by Asako Yuzuki explore the politics of women’s hunger, not just for food, but also for pleasure, for autonomy, and for experience. Her protagonists consume in ways that challenge the way women are conditioned to accept starvation in order to stay thin. The heroines of these books are far from the perfect, childless pop culture characters who have forced entire generations of women to develop chronic body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
In “A Certain Hunger,” desire takes the form of devouring, with descriptive scenes of the protagonist’s hunger. Dorothy Daniels isn’t just starving for food; She hungers for sex, power and control and expresses this through fetishes and the kind of erotic agency rarely granted to women without punishment. Even when sexual agency or fetish is discussed in films like “Babygirl,” directed by Hollywood queen Nicole Kidman, it comes across as a whimper rather than a statement. In contrast, a book like Butter ventures into uncharted territories of sensuality, food as rebellion, and the female body as something to be surrendered to rather than disciplined. All very uncomfortable conversations, conducted with the deep sensitivity that is only possible when a woman writes about a woman.
And then there’s Animal by Lisa Taddeo, possibly the most shocking and difficult read in this entire list. Like the much-discussed Bollywood film of the same name, this book ironically has a deeply flawed female protagonist who is angry and vile, but also deeply vulnerable because of the experiences that shape her. Reading this book is raw and at times unbearable, but there can only be room for such flawed women in the pages of a book. I wonder if she would be celebrated in the same way as the flawed male character in the film of the same name. Highly unlikely.
The freedom to be undone
In many ways, these new heroines are the spiritual descendants of the madmen, but this time they tell their own stories. They are not locked away or defined by a man’s perspective. Even though they all have a backstory, it doesn’t become a crutch for them to redeem themselves or explain themselves. And that alone feels like a quiet revolution. These books don’t ask us to admire these female protagonists; They are not designed to be role models. They are deeply flawed, lacking a moral compass, sometimes shaped by past trauma, or simply programmed in ways that defy reason. But that’s exactly what makes them irresistible. For many readers, they offer a strange kind of relief, almost an escape, into characters who reflect their own desires, their pettiness, their hunger, their seething anger, and their exhaustion at being performative. These books remind us that sometimes it’s not so ugly when a woman gets rid of herself. It’s actually the most honest thing she’ll ever do in her life.
