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Last year, I went to Barnes & Noble with a friend, and as usual, there were several tables showcasing particular books for particular readers. Some of them were along the lines of “Banned Books” or “True Crime.”
On the second floor, I saw a table that was labeled “Sad Girl Summer.” One of the books under this title was “Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion, which I had read about a month earlier.
“Play It As It Lays” is, to my recollection, a fast-paced story about a woman who seems detached from her life and her environment in 1960s California. Abortion and suicide are among the themes covered in its lean 214 pages.
Maybe this was a mild overreaction, but I found myself feeling irritated at the flippant title above such a serious book, not to mention the other books by women piled beside it. “Sad Girl Summer” read as, and likely was, more of a buzzy sales ploy than a genuine advertisement of serious women’s literature.
Several months ago, singer-songwriter Ethel Cain created a Tumblr post expressing her frustration with what the “irony epidemic” does to art. She describes putting her heart and soul into albums that deal with religious trauma, womanhood and relationships, and then receiving countless comments that are like poorly thought-out memes, flippant and devoid of substance.
I’m not trying to scold random people online for making jokes, as I do not think the jokes themselves are the problem. I do agree with Cain in that sometimes, the time and place are wrong, and art, especially art as well-crafted and vulnerable as hers, deserves to be treated with a degree of sincerity.
I wonder what it says about the current moment that the publishing industry seems to have taken to this “irony epidemic.” Important female authors such as Didion, Marlowe Granados, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf and countless others are monuments in their field, “sad girls” or not.
What does it say about the current moment that they are so easily reduced to stock characters? Why are the buyers and sellers willing to dilute important and complicated books to clickable buzzwords?
There is the caveat that intelligent marketing is necessary to attract readers, and I don’t want to jump to conclusions despite my annoyance. “Sad Girl Summer” is flippant, and it isn’t very substantial, but I can’t say it’s morally wrong, or that it isn’t a fun or succinct description.
Not everything regarding art needs to be serious, and advertisement cannot be expected to portray all the complexities of a work in one line. Especially since it is not a direct response to the writers themselves, it is not necessarily a disrespectful wave-off, as it might be when directed specifically at the artist.
The pervasiveness of irony in modern humor is also not inherently wrong. Sometimes it is healthy to laugh at serious topics, and this tendency is at the heart of “dark humor” that is successful or insightful.
Comedy television, in my opinion, is one example of humor combined with darkness. Characters in comedies are often absurd, immoral and selfish, and yet their amusing qualities soften their edges, inviting the audience to give them and their fellow humans grace.
All of this being said, I still bristle at some of the marketing tactics and online discourse around books. There does seem to be a strange willingness to sidestep serious topics in favor of quips.
Perhaps there is a kind of anxiety around sincerity and earnestness, as these qualities reveal actual commitment to ideas. The internet has also introduced a different kind of “attention economy,” which compels creators and advertisers to compete for attention, and money, at a faster and faster rate.
It is somewhat disturbing that a diluted version of a big endeavor is often more appealing, and that these tactics have more to do with corporate interests than artistic interests. If I were a working artist, well-known or not, I think I would also feel a little diminished by the irony epidemic.
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Contact Alyssa Johnson via email: alyssa.johnson@pepperdine.edu
