I called myself, jokingly, a “literary it girl” on the internet and someone I used to know through work apparently got really mad about it. I don’t know which part was upsetting. If anything it seemed like an opportunity to cultivate a sense of private superiority over me for calling myself an “it girl,” an embarrassing thing to call yourself, especially when it has “literary” tacked onto the front of it.
I was thinking about literary it girls not in terms of being a young woman who both writes and is feminine and likes to party which is a boring and irrelevant issue that I have already written about on this newsletter. Marlowe Granados, a bona fide literary it girl if there ever was one, remarked on her Substack simply that “People love to seethe over very feminine women.” Personally, I am happy for anyone that is both good at writing and also good at enjoying their life. I don’t think there are many such people. A lot are trying at one or the other.