booktok may have lost the plot, but lit girls haven’t

notes on: the anti-intellectualisation of booktok, context collapse, and literary it girls (a one-off essay, bc why not?)

did you see that viral tweet about booktok? you know the one: content creator complains that there are, uh, words in books?

in the video, yannareads (who has 285k followers on tiktok, by the way), actually asks the following question:  ‘why are the pages so filled with so many words, like what the fuck???’

comments below the tweet range from comical to incredulous: ‘the way she’s freaking out over words…in a book… where they commonly would be found’ and ‘like making reading your whole personality but not being able to read a book that has no smut, has worldbuilding and is so long is concerning. how did we as a society become like this.’

type ‘booktok’ into x (or twitter, or whatever it is now) and a similar sentiment overrides: ‘booktok has rotted y’alls brains cause what do you mean you can’t read a book in third person,’ one says, whilst another simply writes: ‘things are happening on booktok that you could never imagine.’

and they’re not the only ones. over on tiktok itself, there are growing concerns about the ‘anti-intellectualism’ of the platform. as one booktokker said, earlier this week: as ‘booktok and tiktok have become far more monetised’ the lack of ‘literacy skills’ are astounding: books are ‘reduced’ to ‘singular tropes’ which is leading ‘publishers to only accept submissions with tiktok buzzwords’.

she goes on: ‘we’re not going to get good books anymore if we keep talking about books in the way that we do; it’s our job, it is our duty, it is our responsibility to push and discuss books in the correct way. otherwise we will never get good literature again.’ a war cry, indeed.

and she’s not the only one. the lack of ‘media literacy’ is something often discussed on the app. as one creator put it: ‘people forget that part of reading comprehension is being able to infer the intended audience of a piece of text without the author telling you directly.’ and then she asks – or, perhaps, dares her audience with a question: ‘did you know that you’re supposed to be able to do that? you’re supposed to be able to engage with a piece of text and say: i think the intended audience is [blank]. you’re not supposed to need clarifications … you’re supposed to be able to figure that out on your own.’

my favourite example of this? the soup video. someone demonstrates how to make pea soup: the ingredients, the method, the whole caboodle. the video goes viral. people are loving the soup recipe; they’re trying it out for themselves. they’re pairing it with garlic bread; they’re saying things like ‘this is the best pea soup i’ve ever tried’ or ‘can’t wait to make this!!!!’. and then, of course, comes the inevitable comment: i can’t make this cause i’m actually allergic to peas??

in 2024, everything is constructed ‘for you.’ we’re in the age of personalised marketing; we have our own ‘spotify wrapped’, our own ‘explore’ pages and echo chambers: we expect every piece of content we consume to be tailored exactly to us. to our unique, specific tastes and desires and fears and hopes. even our sense of humour. almost every viral video will have a comment on it, about how this doesn’t exactly refer to them. a video about how to curl your hair? i already have curly hair. a ‘hot take’ about sabrina carpenter? i don’t listen to her. it’s bizarre; not only have we lost the ability to comprehend content in context, but we’ve also, apparently, lost the ability to simply scroll on without saying so.

but with this flattening of intellectualism on tiktok – and across most social media, to be honest – comes an apparent antidote: the ‘literary it girl’. the ‘thought daughter’. the joan-didion-reading-black-coffee-drinking-tote-bag-wearing-eve-babitz-quoting-literary-it-girl who spends her time curating her feeds with aesthetic photos of artful ink-pen scrawled notes or her messy bedside table, creating tiny videos to the tiktok sound of sylvia plath’s ‘fig tree’ analogy.

she’s chic; she’s beautiful; she owns a t-shirt that says ‘reading is hot’. she drinks merlot at dinner parties; she loves talking about which perfume she’d pair with each of her favourite books (jo malone’s pomegranate noir is obviously ‘the bell jar’ coded). her world is painted in shades of monochrome; she studied an arts subject and writes gut-wrenching fiction about the fragility of being ‘a girl’ in the modern world. her whole schtick is intellectualism; she thinks she was born in the wrong decade. and – as helena aeberli points out in her brilliant essay ‘in search of cool’ – she’s not real.

the ‘lit girl’ is a commodified product, designed to appeal to the male gaze:

“we can’t just be writers; we have to be girl writers, in which girl is conjoined to an invisible adjective: hot. or at least, we have to package ourselves as such. because otherwise why would anyone want to read our work? […] she only exists as a figment of our imaginations, in the hallucinatory collective consciousness of the internet, created by clever marketing teams and micro-trend forecasters and the churning floodwater of discourse on twitter and tiktok.”

in other words: she’s just another version of context collapse. she exists in the context of the online world; not the real world.

there’s no such thing as a ‘thought daughter’ or a ‘literary it girl’: there are just young women striving to be heard, young women with dreams and hopes and desires, crushing their work into ‘niches’ or ‘hot takes’ in order to appeal to hungry algorithms.

for black and white binaries, for ‘intellectual’ caricatures.

because that’s the thing about algorithms – and particularly tiktok – it is not designed to exist within its context. it favours extremes; shocking revelations, dopamine-inducing asmrs.

things it doesn’t favour? nuance. thoughtful consideration. being ‘on the fence’ or ‘not yet decided.’

but - as aeberli points out - although the literary it girl may not be real, “we’re obsessed with her anyway.” so obsessed, that many of us want to try and be her. (full disclosure: somebody called me a ‘real-life literary it girl’ this week and it felt like the internal fizz of a crush noticing you. totally thrilling).

in emily sundberg’s substack-viral essay, ‘the machine in the garden’ - about the monetisation of substack - she writes:

“i realized that if you blacked out the names of many of the writers i come across on substack today, i wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.”

in eliza mclamb’s piece ‘everyone’s writing sounds the same now (and that’s fine)’ she comments on this phenomenon:

have you read that essay about the year of the girl? no not that one, the other one. the one that talks about commodifying our image in the new social media landscape. the one where they talk about bows and barbie. no, i’m talking about the other one where the female writer shares a story from her own girlhood and connects it to taylor swift. have you read that before? have you read it a million times? are you a man watching a woman watching that quote pop up on pinterest and twitter and substack over and over again?

yes, yes i have. i know the one. i’ve quoted a few of them already in this piece. i’m writing one of them right now, actually. we’re all so similar; we occupy the same space, with similar tastes in literature and similar higher education certificates and similar desires to be writers and similar hatred of algorithms to which we feel chained because how are we meant to write if we’re not in touch and how are we meant to be successful if we’re not branded?

again, from aeberli:

“we have to market ourselves, package ourselves into corners of the internet and carefully cultivate our social medias. we have to learn seo, play into the algorithm, know the right tags to use, the right time to post. we can’t just strive to be writers, we have to strive to be literary it girls too.”

(see how i write in lowercase? see how i use muted imagery and a colloquial tone? very demure, very mindful, very in-context, very branded according to this topic).

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It all sounds quite depressing, doesn’t it? All this curation; all this languishing on unmade beds reading Sylvia Plath or pretending to read Sylvia Plath whilst instead scrolling mindlessly, looking for inspiration or dopamine or both.

But here comes Helena Aerbeli, making another excellent point:

“I don’t necessarily care that much what the literary it girl label does to Didion’s work, or Babitz’s, or the many other luminaries to whom the term has been applied. I care more about what it does to young female writers today, developing our voices and defining ourselves in a world which both requires and reviles us, which currently sees us as a trending topic but may drop us as soon as the moment passes.”

So do I. I care about this a lot, actually.

And what I’m noticing is that, instead of conforming to this stereotype, a lot of these young women aspiring to the ‘lit girl’ archetype are actually thinking incredibly critically about it. They’re using it to their advantage (they sure know how to market themselves, in 2024), but they’re also writing essays like those I’ve quoted, which exist in their context: with source material and difficult questions and self-aware critiques.

As Princess Babygirl puts it:

“You are both your curated and uncurated self, the text and the subtext, the context and the coconut tree, the summer and the brat. One isn’t more real than the other, nor any less impactful. Pretending otherwise is part of the beautiful tapestry of contradictions that abound online.”

As a TikTok creator, I’m all too aware of the ‘pea soup’ problem. But I love engaging with trends; branding myself a ‘thought daughter’ for the day, or curating tongue-in-cheek 'how to’ guides about a specific aesthetic. And crucial to this exploration of the online is the knowledge that it isn’t real life. The real world is out there with piles of books that will swallow you whole and spit you back out again. Books that will twist you inside out; that reveal the kind of innermost thoughts that would horrify BookTok; books that are hard to read and harder to metabolise and which completely – and fundamentally – change you as a human.

Remember that BookTokker who said the kind of literature was going do change, irrevocably, from now? I really really hope (and also think) that she’s wrong.

I have so much hope, partly because of the writing I see every day; new, brilliant books lining bookshop shelves every week and - at the same time - ‘thought daughters’ or ‘lit girls’ who exist within their context. Who refuse to conform to the algorhithmic flattening. Who write sentences that swirl in my mind as I brush my teeth; that I send to my friends alongside the message: ‘read this, you’ll love it.’

Words that make you think and question and want to run to the library, phone left, upturned, on your bed. To devour the kind of writing you fear you may never be able to produce. To meet these sparky-eyed, hungry, hopeful writers for a glass of white in a pub, one day, and talk about it all: that crumbling aestheticization of what it means to write, and how it meets with the boundaries of the real world, in which writing is just that: typing words into a document with cold tea and cold hands and the feeling of something swelling in your chest because to write is to love.

I saw a Substack note, earlier today, that reads: “‘literary it girl’ perhaps the tiktok brainrot instagram-native self-labeling as self-actualization has finally pervaded substack and become fashionable to write about. Irony hits like a plane on a tower on a september morning.”

Perhaps. But also: I think it might be ‘fashionable’ to write about, right now, because it’s an incredibly popular term, and a lot of thinkers/critics/writers on Substack – like me – enjoy engaging critically with the ‘un-serious’.

Throughout history, writers have grouped together. The Beat poets. The Bloomsbury Group. The Romantics. Instead of bemoaning how ‘all writing sounds the same now’ (it doesn’t), reading these pieces brings me so much hope, because could it be that this is a new kind of writers group? Female-identifying-thought-daughter-lit-girl-chronically-online-yearning-to-be-offline-writers, and thinkers, and critics, learning how to make their work feasible in a burning world?

I hope so, and I think so, and that is everything. 

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A reading list for - and by - wide-eyed culturally critical lit girls:

soft power americana, by Helena Aeberlin (twenty-first century demoniac)

‘girl, the context!’ by Muhleekuhh (m’s substack)

‘you’re not demure, you’re a mess’ by Valerie (Club Reticent)

oh, so you have an aesthetic? it’s a vibe tho, right? by Briffin Glue (Briffin Glue Huffer)

I’m smart and i need everyone to know it, by Luisa (all over the place)

You Don’t Need To Document Everything, by Freya India (GIRLS)

Everyone’s Writing Sounds the Same Now, by Eliza McLamb (words from eliza)

oh so you’re a thought daughter now? should i call joan didion? by Sarah Cucchiara (People’s Princess)

Joan Didion’s “The White Album” for dummies by Amanda! (certified.)

July Reading Recap by Ochuko Akpovbovbo (as seen on)

it’s better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially by Caitlyn (milk fed)