Misery, Complexity and Thinness: The Hidden Holy Trinity in Sad Girl Media

Words: Maya Heuer-Evans

She's a morose character who just wants to be understood. Her speech is self-consciously poetic. She denies herself happiness by continuing to yearn from a distance for an ex who repeatedly stumbles back into her path, just to add to the misery of her situation. She's a #sadgirl, and, crucially, she's thin. 

Over the past decade, there has been a wave of character pieces in literature which follow this same basic formula. The label ''sad girl lit'' is a bit crude, but what novels like Acts of Desperation and My Year of Rest and Relaxation interrogate and profess to lay bare is the complexity of misery, the tragedy of suppressed intelligence, the dissatisfaction inevitable with modern-day monotony.

The glorification of mental illness as something fundamental to the creative mind and the aestheticization of the ''suffering genius'' trope have been analysed enough - that's not what this essay is concerned with. The link between suffering and misunderstood emotional depth is central to these books, and what better way to make this point than through the crudest of symbols: the body. 
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Picture the inevitable final scene of recent biopics (2022’s Emily or 2017’s Mary Shelley spring to mind), in which the tortured poet makes peace with their writer's spirit and scribbles ferociously, frail and bony, onto the page, absorbed in the world of the mind to the point where they neglect the physical by foregoing sleep, food and community. The implication, that the body is a restraint upon a genius mind, is a common message, and one echoed in ‘‘Sad Girl’’ works like Normal People, which do away with this burden on their characters almost entirely by attenuating them, to quote Plath, until ‘thin and essential as the blade of a knife’. 

That the lead characters in these novels are thin, often to a point, is therefore not incidental. It plays into an old tradition of assigning fat characters emotional simplicity and thus stereotyped side roles (think the jolly, big-bosomed mother, the bumbling fool, the full-cheeked and buxom innocent young virgin, whose emotional states are all singular), and seeking to make the emotional torture of the main characters evident by mirroring it in the fragility of exposed collarbones or hollowed cheekbones. There is a circular nature to these associations - fatness is often seen not only as indicative of simplicity, emotional or intellectual, but symptomatic, the result of ignorance or unthinking gluttony. 

So, how does this work? Why does thinness seem a prerequisite, or at least vindicator, of emotional complexity? It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, and yet seems such a given that it's hard to pin down or really explore the psychology behind. The most obvious explanation is that the association between thinness and misery is one borne out of forced experience - eating disorders, self-denial, self-restraint. Likewise, fatness has in the past been the acknowledged and coveted mark of wealth, affluence and contentedness, states seen to be free of complexity (although it should be emphasised that there was almost always a limit to the positivity shown). The body often becomes the battleground during struggles with mental illness, and in some ‘’Sad Girl’’ pieces - like Milk Fed or A Certain Hunger - these real links between thinness and suffering are not reduced to mere visual symbols but exist at the very heart of the novel. That thin people suffer and have complex emotional relationships to their self and body, however, does not mean it is the only state in which people do. But unfortunately many writers take this fallacy as fact and develop it further by assuming that a character will be complex and compelling purely because they are thin and suffering. 

This tradition explains, at least partly, why thinness is often deployed as a byword for suffering, but not the finer point in question: the link between thinness and perceived emotional complexity. One possible reason for this could be because the visual of a thin body seems to align with how the mind categorises emotions. Vulnerability, misery, hunger, sadness, exhaustion - these are angular emotions, which hurt and nick and cut. The body must likewise be sharp and hardened. Gluttony, joy, happiness and jollity are emotions that are felt and then lost, but rarely with nuance or as part of a composite to a more frustrated emotional whole. We view these emotions as simply as we do fatness. 

The optics of being thin as opposed to fat are also a probable influence: when we see visible bones, we can imagine the skeleton, can see the possibility for division, can understand that just as the character is made of many biological pieces, their mind is made of multitudes. We may feel closer to the underneath, with the inner clearly visible under the thin separating membrane, and so the character feels easier to penetrate. 

This might seem like a tenuous point, but it deserves consideration, because this type of associative baggage is often at play, unbeknownst, when we craft or read or watch a character. These mental connections often have unacknowledged real world impact. The age-old contrast between light and dark (which to put it crudely, is light = good and safe, and dark = bad and unsafe), out of which some of the earliest examples of metaphysics were born, has lent itself to colourism and racism, for example. The discriminatory power of the mind can often produce discrimination on a society-wide level when it conflates simplified patterns, like thin = complex, with the much more nuanced human reality.  

The associative triangle between thinness, complexity and suffering, and conversely fatness, simplicity, and jollity, is such an established archetype that it often goes unnoticed. But with the revival of ''heroin chic'' and the rise of Ozempic both providing ominous warning signs as to a devolution back to the nadir of 90s diet culture, it's important to re-examine not only how we talk about the body, but also how we write it.