Weird Women
A New Genre for Our Times
This was always coming. The presidential season is upon us and no matter how disinterested, disaffected, or distrustful of the American political system one is, attention is demanded. This week’s national discourse revolves around J.D. Vance, who is was first vaulted to the national stage as an author, and his politically uncalculated comments about “childless cat ladies.” This can only be assumed to be an attack on a certain type of archetypal perception of the women who usually vote democrat. It’s part of the larger gender divide between the parties, which has never been starker now that the democratic candidate is a woman and the republican nominee and his running mate are…you know. On The Bill Simmons podcast Atlantic writer Derek Thompson proffered the fact that the democratic party hasn’t won the majority of the male vote since 1976—a surprising fact that makes a lot of the current partisan dynamics of gender way more understandable on a practical level.
This, however, is no political newsletter— it is about books, or at least tangentially about books. As one side of the political spectrum talks about how weird the other one is and another tries to shame women as weirdos, it makes me think of my favorite sub-genre to emerge in the past decade. A literary strand that has emerged, grown, and even become relatively popular: weird women. We’re not talking “weird” in that Hollywood-repackaged sense here—those quirky, musing, manic pixie dream girl types of characters or writers. We’re talking the genuinely strange. The kind of writers and characters that seem to have no analogy in popular culture and therefore can legitimately shock and surprise.
This trend…nay, renaissance starts and ends for me with Miranda July, a performance artist, director, and novelist, who is the purest evocation of an artsy person maybe to ever exist. July’s debut, No One Belongs Here More Than You, published in 2007, was a massive hit for a short story collection. July’s prose as opposed to her previous films and performance art proved that her odd-ball way of being is no persona. Both in concept and line-by-line writing her debut showed that she really doesn’t think and therefore write like anyone else—she’s authentically an odd duck. One story opens with the line: “It was a quiet sound, but it woke me up because it was a human sound.”, and it takes place entirely in a woman’s head as from bed she contemplates listening to an intruder breaking into her house. Another involves a swim team that only practices on dry land. July is the type of writer who creates images and lines you will never get out of your head: “It helped that nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren’t killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a real breakthrough in their relationship with themselves.” The anyone they know gets me every time, and has put its permanent hooks into my brain.
While July was and is one-of-a-kind, in the following years a number writers would emerge that equally do their own weird thing but have some shared style and sensibility. Calling these novels autofiction feels reductionist as there’s more formal structure and inventiveness at play, although they tend to have an intensely personal bent that feels close to lived experience. Tonally, the weird women genre has a sense of uncanniness— in Julia May Jonas’ novel Vladimir her academic narrator develops a predatory obsession with a student as her professor husband is accused of being a predator. In Jen Beagin’s second novel Vacuum in the Dark her protagonist has extended dialogues with an imaginary Terry Gross from NPR’s Fresh Air.
These strange ladies also have a certain frankness, a pure honesty, a matter-of-fact observation that extends to sex, the body and selfhood. Here’s how chapter one —“Poop” — of Vacuum in the Dark opens up: “It was hard, misshapen, probably handmade.” Which brings us to one of the most cardinal and important pieces of this mini literary movement: humor. While this type of book is defined by a droll, almost detached style, it is not the same removed tone of a younger generation of say Sally Rooney or Emma Cline with an icy surface and internet-influenced dissociation. Perhaps because the writers of weird women novels are now in their late 40s and early 50s, there is a twinkle, a wonder, a playfulness rather than an angst or uncomfortable nature of this detachment. Writers that seem to say, isn’t having a body and being alive so ridiculous?
Just last month Miranda July published her second novel All Fours. The book starts with a woman with a Miranda-July-like CV (“semi-famous artist”) taking a road trip across the country. It takes a characteristically-Julyian hard turn into an even harder turn, that’s not worth describing or spoiling because it’s simply more fun to discover yourself as a reader. Also characteristic of a weird woman novel is that these are pieces of fiction where there is no real plot but that doesn’t mean things don’t happen. In All Fours things happen, alright. Including some very explicit scenes. All Fours is brilliant in many ways, but in a year where the main publishing trend seems to be the continued explosion of the romance genre, in all of its fantastical forms, it's extremely refreshing to read writers who write pretty spicy content in an adult way. It will make me blush too hard to transcribe any of these passages, but the cardinal difference is that sex and the body is translated through literature not fantasy (if there’s any fantasy, it is literally characters fantasizing). What’s to love, after all, about these intensely unpredictable characters and novels is that they get at the messiness of people in ways that are absurd, stirring, graphic, but always with truth rather than wish fulfillment at their core. That’s what makes them so revelatory for some and, perhaps, so dangerous to others.
Weird novels by and about women explain the fear that underlies “childless cat lady” attacks. Whether it is Beagin’s Greta in her masterpiece Big Swiss or July’s string of free spirits, these are characters that are completely independent. Whereas a lot of the weird fiction by women in the 70s and 80s (Mrs. Caliban comes to mind, which Melissa Broder’s The Pisces is a modern successor of ) was about breaking the chains of domesticity, this new generation of writers doesn’t exist or write about a world that revolves around men or marriage in the same way. They are weird and that means potentially off-putting to some because they don’t follow the parameters of previous literature or society. They are transgressive in a way that is less in your face and more casually comfortable living outside historic norms. The childless, the cat ladies are here to stay—they have confidence, speak truth, and seem entirely unbothered by and totally unconcerned with their opposition. Weird that can be dismissed, diminished, and put inside the box of bigger structures is one thing, but weird that can’t be controlled has a terrifying power.
