“What good do your words do if they can't understand you?” – Erykah Badu
Something I love about getting older is the freedom of distance. You can look back with more clarity on the past, gathering up all the beautiful fragments like colored glass. Lately, I've been listening to some of my favorite songs in adolescence, and I can see deep connections between that music and one of my favorite genres of speculative fiction.
There’s a small explosion of weird girl speculative fiction today, but when did the fire start? Of course, we have plenty of literary forebearers. A tiny fraction of these weird folks who come to mind are Barbara Comyns, Zora Neale Nurston, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, Janet Frame, Octavia E. Butler, Silvina Ocampo, the Brontës, Shirley Jackson, Banana Yoshimoto, etc.
We also have a number of musical muses. I was born in the mid-80s, and my early teens coincided with the golden age of music by weird girls like Erykah Badu, Björk, PJ Harvey, and Tori Amos. Behind them stood folks like Kate Bush, Nina Simone, Elizabeth Fraser, and Patti Smith. All of these artists learned to live with being called kooky if it meant they had creative freedom. They didn’t wear, sing, move, play, or say things that made obvious sense, and so some people didn’t take them seriously. If you wanted to give a logical explanation about what their songs were about, you had to pay closer attention to them than you did to most artists, to pull the lyrics out of your CD case and read them over and over again.
You didn’t need any detective work to feel them, though. I felt what Björk meant when she said she had to wake up in the morning and throw “car parts, bottles, and cutlery” over the side of her mountain, her daily exorcist cleaning to feel safe. I didn’t know what the “gaffa” was the first thousand times I listened to Kate Bush’s “Suspended in Gaffa,” but I knew what it was to feel stuck and yet not be the sort of person who busts through walls or opens boxes I’m told not to.
I listened to Tori Amos nonstop as a preteen, and recently I’ve returned to her. She’s a pillar of weirdness, precisely because she’s always telling the truth. What could be more honest than the surreal lyrics of “Cornflake Girl” from Under the Pink, about losing your raisin girl friend “to the other side”? There’s sometimes a whimsy and sweetness to her imagery, like ghosts chasing nuns around the yard, but often that very whimsy highlights something disturbing. I hadn’t read up on Kurt Cobain’s death before listening to “Mr. Zebra,” but I felt a deep sense of menace when she asked to borrow a sweater from Mr. Zebra because it was “cold cold cold” in her “hole hole hole.” You gain some real world insight by knowing about Courtney Love and the band Hole, but it’s not necessary to feel your way into the song. That’s one of the great things about surreal writing, that it isn’t as tied to time and circumstance.
I bet that many of the same folks who currently write weird girl fiction grew up listening to weird music. The thing is, you can’t always spot this kind of weirdness from across the room. Some of us carry around logs or dogs or wear a black wedding dress everywhere, but many of us look rather ordinary. In Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread, Harriet appears to be a normal single mother in the UK, but her daughter discovers that in her past, she lived in the fictional country of Druhástrana and worked in an oppressive gingerbread factory. It makes perfect sense to me to view the past this way. We could all make up a name for the countries of our pasts, and they often seem far away.
Or think of the surreal horror found in the girl world of a perfectly ordinary creative writing program in Mona Awad’s Bunny. Or the oddly familiar irreality of Ottessa Moshfegh’s amoral characters and brutal landscapes. I’ve noticed that even bestselling weird girl fiction tends to be controversial, with three out of five stars on Goodreads because there are so many ones and so many fives to balance each other out. The negative reviews often say, “I didn’t understand the point of this!” It can be a great sign to garner hate that’s just as passionate as love, though, and some of us love what’s hard to grasp. What was the point of Tori Amos breastfeeding a piglet in promotional photos for Boys for Pele? Even if you don’t think of this as a particular statement or metaphor, you get a great shock from seeing it. It always surprises people to see how twisted a girl can be, and they don’t always like it.
But we persist! And standing alongside books whose weirdness is rooted in the everyday, you have supernatural weird girl horrors of writers like Hailey Piper and Mariana Enríquez. I think many of my writing friends fit into this amorphous category, including Christi Nogle, Suzy Eynon, and Sapphire Lazuli. Many more than I could name!
I will never create an official list like “Best in Weird Girl Horror” because I know I’ll leave out many people who deserve to be there due to my own spotty memory and limitations in taste. So I won’t! I’ve mentioned some weird girls at random, but feel free to fill in the gaps with me, and to leave infinite gaps for others.
This raises another question. Do you have to be a weird girl to write weird girl horror? I say: nah, though it might help. Stephen King gave us Carrie, after all. Nor do you have to be a weird girl to enjoy this kind of art. Whatever gender you are, gentle reader, you’re invited into the world of the weird girls.
Sometimes weird girls worry about aging, losing their girlness, but I’ve noticed a great thing. The singers I loved in my youth have aged, too, and most have lost the ability to hit the high notes they were once able to reach with ease. In place of those high notes, though, their voices are darker and richer, and they can reach depths they never could before. Inside every weird girl is a weird crone who emerges with a fluttering of moth wings. Whatever phase you’re at in your life, it’s a good time to make art.