Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature?

Lately, it seems like literary fiction has been unable to escape the scourge of “sad girl literature.” Though the genre has deep roots, it garnered widespread popularity during the pandemic, when it came to encapsulate the malaise of millennial and Gen Z existence: unfulfilled desires, life under late-stage capitalism, the threat of climate change, and so on. So prolific is the genre that it now seems to have flattened the branding of contemporary women’s fiction into something of a monolith. This isn’t to say that these novels are without merit—far from it!—but the way they’ve been marketed speaks of an industry stunted by the popularity of its own creation.