Together, this class of celebrity makes up the archetype of the Lit Girl. A spin on the traditional It Girl, the Lit Girl is defined by her chic mobile library. Think of it as a variation of the iconic Gillian Flynn ‘cool girl’ monologue. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is smart. Cool girl reads, and you should too.
A Lit Girl doesn’t have to be famous, even. You can spot her on your Instagram feed any other day, artfully positioning a Fitzcarraldo edition in the lower left hand corner of an sun-kissed Instagram story, communicating that she is someone who is elegant and academic, someone who reads at a park – when she’s not on her phone taking pictures of it, that is. Or perhaps she’s at a coffee shop, a copy of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen perched next to her matcha. Or perhaps she’s underlined some paragraphs of bell hooks’s all about love, hopeful it will be screenshotted by a man who doesn’t care whether she lives or dies (no comment on whether I’ve done this one myself). (I have.) Her social media presence – her real life presence even – is accented by literature. She carries books, she poses with books. The Lit Girl is a woman who reads.
Whether any of this is true or not, whether the spines on any of those books have actually been cracked, is much less interesting than the fact that these Lit Girls want the rest of us to believe it is. They want girls to read because girls reading is chic. And we do, at least if the growing gender gap in readers (and writers) is anything to go by.
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Like all influencer trends, our knee-jerk reaction is, of course, to be snide about this. These women are not really reading, we think to ourselves, automatically. They’re not real intellectuals. They’re fake. And they are, of course, girls.
There are no Lit Boys out there – even though it’s an archetype that has an obvious male equivalent. A man who shoves dog-eared copies of Hemingways and Kerouacs in the back pockets of his Carhartt jeans. A man who ‘just doesn’t really rate Sally Rooney’ and quotes Frank O’Hara at you and perhaps has an F Scott Fitzgerald stick’n’poke tattoo. Of course, Lit Boys exist, but they don’t inspire the same ire as Lit Girls.