everyone wants to be a lit girl

and same!

credit: Kamilla Varga (@kamillacreates)

The internet is full of hotties who read.

There is a particular cool girl who has perfected the art of intellectualism as an aesthetic dominating the bookish social media spheres. A brand distinct from professional cool girl readers and their book stylists, like Kendall Jenner with her book consultant or Kaia Gerber’s newest venture, Library Science, we’re safe to assume these internet cool girls actually read the books they’re casually carrying on the subway and photographing in cafes next to $9 oat milk lattes or on patterned picnic blankets in the park.

The literary it girl, the lit girl, if you will, would play well in any corner of the internet because she always matches the vibes of the moment. She’s been talked about to the point of exhaustion (sorry for further exhaustion). Her aesthetic is authentic; we’ll ignore the fact that it’s indistinguishable from the other lit girls’ aesthetics.

She stumbled into bookish social media by accident, as if scouted on the streets with a book in hand, or perhaps she’s the real deal and actually works with books; social media is just a way to assert her place, but she doesn’t really identify with the realms of Bookstagram or BookTok, despite that being her main audience. She comes off as someone who is hardly trying at all and any allure isn’t by design but is instead some unnameable it factor.

She’s thin, white, attractive, fashionable. She lives in New York City (it’s New York or nowhere!), would fit in sipping coffee at a Parisian cafe and in fact seems to be in Europe a suspicious amount, makes dirty martinis her personality, reads on the subway, and most importantly, is never seen without a book in hand.

She isn’t engaged in controversy, she isn’t posting about anything political or overtly deep, but she projects an air of intellectualism anyway that is supposed to imply her values. Perhaps she doesn’t need to post her thoughts on genocide or women’s rights or racism; she seems intelligent, after all, and surely she must be on the right side because she’s posting the kind of books that would imply she is. Directly declaring her politics or opinions isn’t sexy and would rip off the thin veil of mystery she’s curated, so instead she allows us to project and assume. If we interpret her little breadcrumbs of personality incorrectly, well, that’s on us.

Toward the end of May, advanced copies of Sally Rooney’s upcoming novel, Intermezzo, went out to the book influencers and publishing folks. Everyone who received one reacted, understandably, as if they’d won the lottery, and in the literary world, they kind of have.

They were crying screaming throwing up. They were literally shaking rn. Hundreds of people snapped pics for their stories, filmed unboxing videos, and espoused their gratitude to the publisher. If you received a Sally Rooney galley and no one online witnesses it, does the Sally Rooney galley exist at all?

It isn’t particularly surprising considering the hype around Rooney’s last novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, which had the girlies frothing over the book’s merch more than the book itself, including the infamous bucket hat and all the discourse it sparked.

The status galley isn’t a new concept, nor is it reserved for Sally Rooney, though merch as a status symbol feels uniquely tailored to the social media era where we are all trying to be influencers, even when we’re not. Online, we declare our interests and identities easily; offline, we can only make the same declarations by literally wearing our interests.

Some capitalistic pursuits we advertise are embarrassing or were once cool but are now a harbinger of millennial cringe (The New Yorker tote bag comes to mind). But reading is cool. Appearing smart and thoughtful is cool. Maybe people are reading and loving their status galleys. Maybe they’re wearing their BWWAY bucket hats while the unopened book collects dust on their shelves. They are both status symbols nonetheless.

Before I go any further and run the risk of leaning too far into jealous hag territory, I’ll insert a disclaimer that I’m not calling anyone out here. Anything that encourages people to read and think critically — even influencers and celebrities — is ultimately a good thing. Literary it girls have power, and they have power I do not have to expand peoples’ thinking. I am also lazy, and though I am not particularly interested in the content creation side of things that would elevate me to the level of Sally Rooney galleys, I am not above the impulse to fit into the culture that we’ve created.

But what is the culture, exactly? Readers are mimicking the influencer behavior we see daily from beauty, fashion, or travel content creators. And mostly for free, unlike the other, more lucrative content spaces. In turn, publishers are marketing their books to content creators as if they were selling luxurious lifestyle products.

Every time I log into Instagram, I see another PR package for an upcoming book release including cute stickers, nail polish, candy, some form of plastic waste that wouldn’t be out of place in a cosmetics or skincare PR package.

Self-proclaimed lit girls are lining up for a chance to participate in aesthetic intellectualism, keeping publishers’ marketing budgets low. With the way book buying is going, of course publishers are going to capitalize on influencer’s aesthetic culture, primed for marketing, where the only compensation they must offer is a free flimsy copy of a book or a bucket hat manufactured in a sweatshop.

Of course, we mostly all like to read anyway. We don’t have to exert much effort to take it one step further and show everyone we like to read. But none of the merch improves our reading experience. A galley is an early, exclusive copy, and it’s free, but it’s the same book we’ll all be reading in a few months, give or take a few typos and more expensive hardcover binding.

The literary it girl has been on the scene for a while now, but once those high-profile advanced copies come in, so many of us are desperate to become one. Or at least, to come across as one on social media. I’m not sure discussing a book’s content or quality itself is as cool as looking like someone who might read the book. Sharing a potentially unpopular opinion at length would shatter the illusion; appearing too earnest isn’t part of the brand.

I don’t think lit girls are sinister, though. I don’t think they’re any less deserving of taking up space on social media, nor do I think they’re actually dim-witted or simply pretending to read books. At least, most of them probably read more than I do.

Literary it girls might actually be smart, they might actually be cool, but part of their allure is that their intellectualism feels slightly unattainable to the masses. Most people do not want to read theory and criticism or cannot keep up with the cycle of hot new releases. Many people will allow the literary it girl to do the work for them.

I think there’s a difference, however small, between aesthetic intellectualism — stemming from our compulsion to warp every possible aspect of the self until it’s digestible online — and performative intellectualism. The former is often rooted in some version of reality, just romanticized beyond authenticity. The latter is also concerned with image above all else, but attempting to look like you’re thinking without actually thinking feels like anti-intellectualism in disguise.

Performative intellectualism allows individuals to assume the identities of others they find intelligent without ever having to engage in critical thought themselves. They use authors, directors, musicians, and celebrities who appear smart enough as their identity markers.

The aesthetic of intellectualism isn’t that deep; it’s just another one-size-fits-all identity we’re selling. Every new aesthetic trend gets a pithy label, and we fall in line, eager to perform our little capitalistic dance routines. The exploration of these pre-packaged identities may be part of the process of carving out a place for ourselves, but adopting narrowly defined aesthetics as our full personality keeps us from discovering our own sense of self and making genuine connections with people in the real world.

The cool girls are both easily defined and aloof, but I suspect their detachment is a defense mechanism we are all familiar with, no matter what costume we don or performance we put on for the masses, designed to protect the soft pulp of our ego that cannot bear to be perceived at all.

Parallel to the rise of the literary it girl, but not necessarily in tandem with, has been an embrace of anti-intellectualism on the internet. Call it brain rot or TikTokification or whatever you will. Even in book spheres, social media decries intellectualism — or, anything that makes us question our own perspectives — as inaccessible and too morally gray.

When we don’t understand a concept or the writing style leans too literary, we call the author pretentious, the writing stale. We’re ignoring authors’ bad behavior or problematic views because we’re “reading to escape,” so we’re turned off when characters behave badly because we want our literature to uphold our personal utopias. If a book does not explicitly spell out the moral of the story, or if the moral is presented through complicated and unlikable characters so that we must arrive at conclusions ourselves, we proclaim that the book has no value. One of those morally gray characters will cause us to oppose the book’s existence in its finished form entirely. There is only room for good versus evil.

And, most troubling of all, we’re calling books we didn’t like for personal reasons bad because we are all the center of our own universes, and that means we aren’t reading outside of our comfort zones or being challenged by different views.

Not all literary it girls fall into this trap of individualism, of course, and this phenomenon isn’t unique to books. It’s a symptom of being online in general — evidenced best by the bean soup TikTok (better known as the “what about me” effect). If we can’t relate to a book through our singular experiences, the book must not be valuable to anyone; we say it’s a reflection of the book rather than holding up a mirror to our own biases and preferences. Let people read what they want, we say, but we don’t want to let writers write what they want if there’s a chance it’s not for us.

Even if anti-intellectualism is gaining traction, the desire to appear intellectual hasn’t disappeared. True intellectualism requires that we engage in critical thought outside of ourselves. It sounds obvious, but when we turn intelligence into a performance, it is nothing but a convincing illusion.

Of course, we can be intelligent without engaging in the ouroboros that is online discourse, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we assume the cool girls’ online neutrality just means they are discussing philosophy and world views at dinner parties with tablescapes or in dimly lit cocktail bars with their equally cool friends. The vagueness is by design. It doesn’t really matter if you understand a book if you look like you understood it, or at least looked hot while reading it.

If we’re willing to perform intellectualism in every other way, or to document the bits of our lives that make us look both cool and smart, publicly taking a neutral stance when it comes to subjects that truly expand our minds is hypocritical.

This feels particularly ironic when the books being photographed and posted are ones we’d consider high-brow or big-brained. We want to be aligned with Joan Didion or Sally Rooney in aesthetics only, but we draw the line at actively or publicly engaging in their belief systems or cultural critiques. It’s also not a coincidence that these women’s aesthetics are primarily defined by their whiteness, and their politics benefit from the same privilege.

I always wonder, what would the majority of the readers who call Joan Didion a vibe, who desperately wanted to snag something from her estate sale, say if they were sat across from her at a dinner party? God, she’d hate all of us. Sylvia Plath would be screaming “I stuck my head in an oven and now you’ve romanticized my life, you dumb fucks” (also, she’d probably say something racist).

And I also wonder: What does Sally Rooney think of all of this? She is a well-documented socialist and is committed to her Marxist critiques of capitalism and its parallel structures. She remains off social media and wary of her fame, for what I can only assume are equal parts sanity and protest. (Joan Didion was also hyperaware of the consequences of her popularity and disinterested in the performance).

But neither woman overtly instructs readers on how to think, which allows us to embrace the intellectual aesthetic without actually engaging critically with the text, or at least cherry-picking the parts we’re willing to dissect.

From the website Socialist Voice:

Rooney’s novels, therefore, do not directly instruct—didactics have never been her modus operandi—rather, she extends an invitation to consider the complexities of millennial existence through a Marxist lens, among others, however imperfectly. It is up to her audience—fans and detractors alike—whether to accept this invitation or not.

I’d argue that Rooney’s characters themselves have adopted socialist-adjacent identities as social markers more than deeply held fundamental truths to live by. It is the same performance so many of us are engaged in as well. All of the authors who the hot girls worship write pretentious characters whose main priority is controlling how the world perceives them, and most millennial white women can relate to that on some level. We’re performing capitalism like clapping monkeys at a circus as if that’s all we know how to do, unsure why we’re doing it. It’s no surprise that Rooney is hailed as the writer of the privileged millennial generation.

Sometimes, when watching these performances of intellectualism online, it feels like we’re not consuming the same medium as each other. The point of the movie or book or song is so wildly missed that you think, surely, one of us has misinterpreted the meaning. But if the point was to never think critically about what we’re consuming in the first place, it doesn’t matter if we’re technically holding the same book in our hands. We are not reading the same text. We’re reading what we’ve projected onto the page and what we hope to find there. This possibility is part of what makes reading so magical, but it also allows us to stick our heads in the sand at the slightest discomfort.

In an online landscape where narcissism is not only nurtured but rewarded, what incentive do we ever have to try looking at things from a different perspective? Why bother thinking about the author’s intention or the complexity of meaning? If we want to take a Sally Rooney novel, latch onto it because we too have put ourselves in situationships that left us feeling like shit, and throw away any deeper meaning or intellectual thought, nothing is stopping us. The bucket hat isn’t discerning, and neither are we.

My hope is that the literary it girls wield their power consciously. And even if they don’t, anything that prompts more people to read (and potentially, think critically about what they’ve just read) is ultimately a good thing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with looking cool while reading a book, and no one owes anyone anything on the internet. I cannot begrudge them their trendy outfits and status galleys and je ne sais quoi. But I can wish for an internet where bookish people value social consciousness as much as we value aesthetics, no matter how unrealistic that feels.

If we’re going to bemoan the state of the world or the ominous trajectory we feel ourselves to be on, then we need intellectuals who will find us solutions. We need people who are willing to not only think but think critically about themselves, the ways of the world we’ve held to be fundamentally true, and our place in them.

Maybe change doesn’t start with literary it girls, and it certainly doesn’t start with Substack ramblings, but what we consume and what we put on the internet for others to consume isn’t nothing. Publishers continue to prioritize the voices that readers — and those who influence us to read — keep buying into online.

If the people we elevate to literary it girl status read more diversely or publicly engage with the unsexy bits of culture, even just in reflection on their cool girl books, we could at least hope that their followers feel empowered to think more as well. If it’s all just an illusory performance, we might as well make it count.

Before you go: Find me on Instagram, Goodreads, StoryGraph, or Letterboxd to keep up with my obsessive tracking habits in real time.