We all know the book, the TV show, the film: a young female protagonist careering through a stream of unhealthy choices and toxic relationships. Generally, the steady increase of “complicated female protagonists” was heralded as a net positive across media. At last, female characters were being written, and affirmed, in ways their male counterparts had been for decades. Angry and imperfect.
More recently, this feeling has soured into a general eye-rolling and reductive critical treatment of these characters’ difficult lives – labelling them “Messy Millennials”.
Key narrative threads include the experiences of women, non-binary, trans and AFAB (assigned female at birth) protagonists, as they live with oppressions such as racism or gender-based violence. These characters may have issues with drugs or alcohol, mental health or managing relationships. They may act selfishly or obsessively.
As usual, the literary output of anyone-not-a-man gets lumped into “women’s fiction”. Assigning the aforementioned narratives under a single label is reductive - diminishing important narratives depicting how we exist in these times. Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You are examples of highly disparate stories both labelled Messy Millennial narratives.
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There are pitfalls of the Messy Millennial trope worth acknowledging. The voices most likely to take the platforms previously dominated by white cis-gender men are white cis-gender women. Their protagonists reflect this: frequently privileged, white and conventionally attractive. This grants them more leeway to perform supposedly “risque” acts without ramifications. Ottessa Moshfegh - a millennial who depicted a non-millennial in My Year of Rest and Relaxation - satirises this trope through her nameless protagonist. Aware of her limitations as a supermodel attractive, affluent white woman, she seeks to escape these by sleeping for a year, hoping to wake up renewed and capable of genuine experience. Her namelessness further demonstrates her yearning for self-erasure.
Another criticism levelled at the Messy Millenial is that they do not exhibit self-development. There is an expectation they will reflect on bad habits, repair their relationships, etc. But what is the point of a redemptive arc? Why do we insist these characters change, when the world around them does not?
What does it mean to refer to these lives as “messy”?
In my novel, How to be a French Girl, the 27-year-old protagonist wrestles with her limitations as a working-class woman. Afraid of coming across as Too Much, Too Greedy, or Trying Too Hard, she slips between states. Domineering and aggressive, then submissive. Bingeing then denying her hunger completely. She is recessive and dominant simultaneously, chasing her shadow self.
When I was approaching publishers with the manuscript, one publisher gave feedback that the protagonist needed a trauma backstory to explain her behaviour – they suggested rape. But she is already aware of the conditions she swims in. Her nihilism and self-destruction stem from it. She lives in conflict with the male gaze, submitting to it and then manipulating it.
To deal with this internal discord, she is an escapist. Gripped by the possibility of escaping these conditions, she becomes enamoured with an older, financially powerful Parisian man, Gustave. To win his attention, she seeks to create a new identity for herself. This becomes a drive to be a “French Girl”.
A concept that saturates popular culture, the French Girl is primarily depicted as white and privileged (with a great skincare regime). She is charming but aloof, naive but intellectual, effortlessly beautiful but not too beautiful, bohemian but upper-class. It is a tempting, romantic ideal; its appeal proliferated across social media in hashtags and makeup tutorials. The proposal of achieving “French girl style” helps drive sales of cosmetics, fashion, furniture, holidays, lifestyles…
Becoming the French Girl is impossible, obviously - this is an image, an aestheticised non-reality. It only mirrors real life in that it bears the hallmarks of intergenerational wealth and privilege. The French Girl, then, is anti-mess: a state of interior and exterior cleanliness. Having internalised classism and misogyny, our protagonist seeks redemption as the French Girl: a state of total immaculacy, flattened and precise.
In reality, trauma does not follow a redemptive arc.
Michaela Coel has described how she gave her protagonist Arabella - a black woman who is sexually assaulted - the space to be complex and occasionally problematic. Dissociating from the trauma, her behaviour escalates, running her emotional and financial dependency on friends dry, until she finds herself cornered. As the opening title card of I May Destroy You flickers, its meaning changes, the open question being one of agency: who may destroy? May I destroy others? Who grants these boundaries? Arabella does exhibit self-development - but this is achieved by going through the “mess,” which Coel immerses her in.
Sheena Patel’s protagonist, a second-generation Indian immigrant, enters a situationship with a wealthy white man. The situationship becomes a power struggle, and the protagonist seeks out control elsewhere: stalking his other lover and destroying her own life piece by piece. She is entirely aware of the structures which keep her perceived worth from equating with his value system. Her rage is an attempt to level these systems via the only means available to her.
In How to be a French Girl, the protagonist’s friend Jenny is a grounding antithesis. While they share the same background, one difference between them is that Jenny does not loathe her own working-class roots, and has achieved a sense of security, in contrast to the protagonist’s fervent insecurity. She directs her frustration to Jenny’s stable relationship with a high-earning man. A valid frustration at a limitation of womanhood - having to “marry money” to pursue one’s true passions. But, of course, this criticism contradicts her own all-encompassing goal to win a new life through Gustave.
The “mess” that the Messy Millennial apparently exhibits actually refers to the erupting of rage and abjection otherwise confined by societal expectation. Designating these to such a label downplays, and often humorises, the impact of these conditions.
The expectation that these characters display faultless self-development does not allow them to be whole. While gender-based violence specifically is systematic, it can perform nonsensically; the choice to perpetrate can be made at random, potentially devastating the person harmed and changing the course of their life. Humans do not exist in a vacuum - we have the ability to harm others. And we navigate a sticky entanglement of principles to survive. Allowing these characters complexity grants agency in a system which has otherwise denied this.
Identifying as a survivor or victim can help people come to terms with trauma. However, these concepts are not useful to everyone - under systematic oppression, is “survivorship” possible? Overall, the expectation of a redemptive arc suggests the burden of overcoming these conditions is down to the oppressed. It is a heavy expectation: coping mechanisms become skewed, manifesting as self-harm; anger and fear finding their outlets. A chance to identify oneself outside of the typical victim/survivorship narrative can be hugely validating. So why not allow anger and fear, with no end?
How to Be a French Girl is not a righteous novel. The protagonist does not seek victimhood - she seeks power, that ugly thing, and so her actions become increasingly ugly, questionable, irredeemable. Allowing chaos and complexity means allowing grace. Allow mess.
How to Be a French Girl is published by Weatherglass Books
