Some of my favorite books of all time center on raw and messy, complicated women. Unlikable women. Women trying and failing to get their shit together. Women who rebel against societal expectations and women who are too feral to fit in, even if they tried. Feminine rage. Sexual obsessions. Unreliable narrators. I simply cannot get enough!

Recently, it's come to my attention that there's a name for this subgenre of female-centered books: weird girl lit. And once I heard about it, I started to see it everywhere.

Readers on BookTok are sharing their favorite weird girl finds. I love the way @darc.digital explained what the genre means to her. She said, "Weird girl lit is a subgenre characterized by an unconventional, unapologetic, and often unhinged female protagonist exploring taboo topics such as feminine rage, societal pressures, and the messiness of womanhood."

These books are predominantly written by women and center female main characters, but weird girl aficionados sometimes debate whether books written by or centering men can also be part of the weird girl canon.

My Instagram feed is similarly full of people recommending their favorite weird books for weird girls and pics of "weird girl" displays at book stores and libraries.

And on the subreddit r/WeirdGirlLiterature, I have truly found my people. Readers in that community are sharing top-notch recommendations every single day, causing my to-be-read list to grow at an unprecedented rate.

Interested in adding some weird to your bookshelf? Here are six weird girl essentials that I've read and loved, and five more that are on my TBR.

Weird Girl Books I Love

1. I loved Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. I'm not usually much of a short story reader because I really love the feeling of settling in with a novel for the long haul, but this collection had me in a chokehold, and I return to it often.

2. I loved Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. It's about Keiko, a 36-year-old misfit working in a convenience store in Tokyo. Keiko takes great comfort in running the store in an orderly fashion and pretending to be a "normal" person. But her family and coworkers keep pressuring her to do things she doesn't want to do, like finding a husband and getting a "real job." And when she tries to conform to what the world seems to want from her, things get messssssy fast.

3. I loved Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. In a remote village in Poland, Janina is an older woman who lives alone. She fills her days with studying astrology, translating poetry, and housesitting for wealthy people who keep seasonal residences in the country. After her neighbor turns up dead (and then a few more bodies pile up), Janina starts her own investigation, with very...interesting...results.

4. I loved All Fours by Miranda July. It's about a married middle-aged mom and artist who plans a road trip from Los Angeles to New York, but she doesn't get very far. At her first stop for gas, she checks into a motel and starts making a series of increasingly wild decisions that had my heart pounding as I turned the pages.

5. I loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. This is such a weird girl classic! It's narrated by the deliciously strange Merricat, who lives at Blackwood House with her sister Constance and their old uncle Julian after most of their relatives died in a mass poisoning incident during one fateful family meal. Merricat spends her time putting protective charms on herself and the house, trying to avert further disasters, but she can't stop her cousin Charles from showing up with his eye on the family fortune.

6. And I also loved Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. After Leah comes home late from a deep-sea expedition with a strange new vibe, her wife Miri struggles to understand the changes that have come over her. As Miri searches for answers, Leah recounts what exactly happened to her while she was away.

Weird Girl Books I Want To Read

7. I want to read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Originally published in 1995, this book tells the story of a young woman who has spent her entire life in an underground bunker with 39 other women. The women are guarded by men who never speak, and they have no memories of what the world was like before the bunker.

8. I want to read Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. It's about Zelu, a disabled Nigerian American woman who gets fired from her job and takes the opportunity to write a book just for herself. She creates a science fiction epic, and when she musters the courage to share it, she becomes an overnight literary sensation.

9. I want to read A Good Person by Kirsten King. I've been seeing this book all over the weird girl internet. Then, my coworker Lara's review 100% influenced me, and now I must have it. She wrote, "A woman named Lillian is in a toxic situationship with a man who couldn't care less if she lived or died — we've all been there. Reeling after he cuts things off with her despite her doing everything in her power to be the 'Cool Girl,' she drinks a little too much and tries to perform a hex on him. Which, TBH, he deserved."

10. I want to read Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino. Margo and her husband are in the market for a house, and it's NOT going well. They've lost 11 bidding wars in 18 months. Then, Margo hears about a perfect home opening up, and she begins an unhinged quest to snag it for herself before the listing goes public.

11. And finally, I want to read Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh. Moshfegh's books are a mainstay of the weird girl genre, most famously My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I liked enough that I'm eager to read another one of her books. Eileen is about a young woman who gets a job as a secretary at a boy's prison. She becomes obsessed with a new counselor who starts working at the prison, Rebecca. But Rebecca's not what she seems, and she pulls Eileen into an unimaginable crime.

Are you into weird girl books? Share some of your favorites in the comments or via the anonymous form below:

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