You Are the Snake
By Juliet Escoria
Soft Skull, 256 pages, $16.95
This is the era of the literary It Girl. While the moniker serves mostly as a branding gimmick, this moment of supposed female literary coolness—if we must call it anything—has produced genuinely interesting, if flawed, writers, such as the ever-present Honor Levy and Allie Rowbottom. The It Girls live in coastal cities, appear on hip podcasts, and are profiled in the remaining glossy media magazines, playing the parts of bona fide literary starlets. It may be superficial, but it’s fun, and perhaps it’s all that’s left of an increasingly irrelevant literary scene. I’ll take some doe-eyed ladies posing and partying over the alternative—which is seemingly nothing at all.
The It Girls’ books, for the most part, are pretty good. The characters are cool, even if they’re trying to play it off; they’re hip to online trends and hit up fancy parties. As a guy, it’s fun to read about the lives of these self-destructive women with an eye for style.
But most of us, women included, aren’t cool, or even capable of feigning coolness. Sometimes, I get bored of too-cool-for-school characters and want to read about a non-starlet, an uncool woman. I want a woman who’s going nowhere and getting there destructively—a nowhere woman.