Book Review: Sad Girl Novel by Pip Finkemeyer

If you’ve visited a bookshop in the last few years, you’ll have spotted a “sad girl novel”, distinguished as much by its distinctive cover — most often featuring a young, white woman, dressed in something diaphanous and possibly flopped across a bed or couch with her face obscured — as by its focus on a creatively inclined 20-something protagonist’s coming of age amid the challenges of the current moment.

The tropes of this publishing trend — of which commonly cited exemplars include Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and the works of Sally Rooney — are deployed both sincerely and satirically in the buzzy debut novel by Melbourne writer Pip Finkemeyer. Titled — what else? — Sad Girl Novel, it follows Kim, a 27-year-old Australian living in Berlin who, following a romantic encounter with an American literary agent named Matthew, quits her job to write a novel (“something that was authentically me but still wildly successful”) over the course of a year.