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No Hard Feelings by Genevieve Novak review – another hot-mess-millennial novel
A twentysomething frets over friends, romance and work in a debut that fails to say much new or profound about why young women can be so unhappy
Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email and listen to our podcastThe lives of women in their twenties and thirties are ripe for unpacking: it’s a time of great change, personal epiphanies and coming into one’s own. Over the past few years, the enormous popularity of Sally Rooney and her ilk proves that there is a constant hunger for these stories, especially since the ugly truths and minutiae of women’s lives have historically been sidelined.
From covers to content, “sad girl lit” is undoubtedly a current literary trend. It almost always centre on white, heterosexual, middle-class women; while their struggles are valid, they’ve got a lot to fall back on. Some of the books in this field are startlingly original and insightful – Meg Mason’s 2020 novel Sorrow and Bliss is a wry, intelligent exploration of living with mental illness – and some follow a more predictable trajectory of overcoming adversity to find contentment.
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