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I often fantasize I am an underpaid adjunct lecturer in literature somewhere very cold, like cold enough for tweed skirts and very-genuine-berets. And if I was, or if I could be, or honestly, bitch, I might be a professor one day, I daydream about the class title and syllabus of the topic I’d live to lecture on. It always comes back to “LIT 102: Fuccbois and How to Spot Them in the Literary Wild”. It’d meet on Tues/Thurs in the morning so that you could have a long weekend.
I have since adapted this idea to include Fuccwomen (and just the blanket concept of Fuccpeople, which leads into the modern adaptation of the elusive Softboi) because whoa buddy, they’ve also emerged into the modern literary fiction canon as well. I credit this to Ottessa Moshfegh alone, but they’ve been here since Tolstoy created Vronsky.
In short, I find Fuccpeople and Softbois FASCINATING. There is no judgment here. To me, they just symbolize another way to be, another way experience and trauma alchemize pain into behavior. And that’s as much to say about these characters as well as the environment around them that facilitated their growth into the fuccperson: a just-barely-pre-9/11 NYC, a spa in Zurich, fascist Naples, a Florida-adjacent 60s+ motorpark .
You might be new to this phenomenon, the Fuccperson and the Softboi. They’ll never self-identify as such, which should be the first red flag on their long path of lukewarm manipulation, shit-never-together-iness, the appearance of caring over actually caring to gain a service (sex) or good (sex) or absolution from their loneliness (sex). There’s an aloofness that is put-upon to hide their little vulnerable larval form inside their hardened little carapace. They wear those short beanies that, appropriately, make their heads look like a dickhead. They might even refer to themselves as “ya boi.” They are the John Mayer, the Timothee Chalamet in Ladybird’s of fiction. I know not one woman who has managed to side-step all the fuccbois she has encountered.
Which is where the Fuccgirl comes in - for me, the fuccgirl is just one of many modern day extensions of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but at the end of the femininity spectrum. She’s the April Ludgate, but without the heart. She’s the anti-heroine in heroine’s clothing. She’s entirely foreign to me, because she began life as a male fantasy created in entertainment conglomerate boardrooms by men who fear their mothers. But what really fascinates me about the fuccwoman/fuccgirls of modern literary fiction is when these women get incorporated into the works of their female authors. When co-opted by female-identifying writers, she gets to traverse strange lands and corners of the human experience; places you don’t get to see when people are behaving properly and thank god they don’t. (See: Alissa Nutting’s pedophilic narrator in Tampa. Actually, all of Alissa Nutting’s work, honestly.)
These are just sampling of my favorite archetypes I’ve found in the canon (both classic and contemporary). I’ve also compiled them into a Bookshop list, if you’d like to order them from your favorite indie like a very beautiful, very intelligent person:
CLASSICS:
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier:
Mr. De Winter has all the makings of a 1930’s fuccboi - an inability to be alone, a mysteriously dead wife, a mommy complex with Mrs. Danvers. Also, a huge mansion to ignore you in?! I can smell the gaslighting and the arson from here. (God, I love fire.)
Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner:
Cults and fuccbois work in similar ways: they prey on the vulnerable. But not so fast, Mr. Neville! Edith writes romance novels, flees to Switzerland, and is thoughtful to a fault. Edith Hope might be one of my favorite mousy bitches of modern literature, yet she is no one to con into an ordinary life, full of the modern trimmings of marriage, consumption, artifice.
Anne Boleyn by Howard Brenton:
Anne Boleyn walked so Fleabag could run; Full of cheeky asides, Anne Boleyn gets her time in the sun as more than a martyr, more than a predator, more than a ghost story and sexual cautionary tale in this modern play. I like to think this version of Anne would be comfy drinking mead with my dual-literary crushes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Further Reading: Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Toni Morrison (Sula).
CONTEMPORARY:
Made For Love by Alissa Nutting:
It’s become public knowledge at the bookstore I work at that my taste in fiction is extremely hard to pitch (see: a bit fucked up). We even have a game for it, which mostly involves how many copies of this book I can handsell to customers. What does this book lack? Really nothing - it has a Jeff-Bezos-adjacent husband trying to microchip his wife, Hazel, to bond them forevermore with their thoughts in a Florida-adjacent motorhome village. It has a dolphin love story. It has a sex doll love story. It pays homage to 50 Shades of Grey. It has a neutrally unlikable narrator who you somehow find yourself rooting for. It is, in my eyes, a perfect novel.
The Story of A New Name (Neapolitan Quartet #2) by Elena Ferrante:
At any point during really any day, there is a high likelihood that I am shaking my fists at the gods crying, “NINOOOOO”. I’m always at a loss of who is the true fuccperson of the Neapolitan novels: Lila, Nino, or Nino’s dad. On the one hand, Nino’s dad is a POET. But on the other hand, Nino in modern times would make you listen to his EDM sets on Soundcloud. Lila would just pull a “I just get along with guys better?” line, so it’s a real toss up. At the very least, I think both of the Sarratore men would wait in a line for Supreme if they were in modern times and not 1960’s fascist Naples.
The Pisces by Melissa Broder:
Here’s another “stay with me here” title, in that this book is another one that’s impossible to pitch but delectable to read in all its bizarre glory. A woman on sabbatical from her landlocked Ph.D program falls in love with a merman from the cliffs near her sister’s Venice Beach mansion. It’s equal parts porn-to-plot, but there’s also no lack of insights on what one will do to manipulate their love to conform to a life that’s not theirs to live. Sure, it’s merman erotica, but it’s perfect. Read it.
Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller:
This short story collection was my first inkling for the concept of Fuccgirls; these aloof, despondent women who got into the kind of trouble I’d never seen before in short fiction. These women move through the world with as much difficulty as humid air rolling into the oil-riddled Gulf Coast towns these women can’t seem to escape.
Further Reading : Catherine Lacey (The Answers, Certain American States), Courtney Maum (Touch), Raven Leilani (Luster)
ANTIDOTES: So you’ve been fucc’d with — you’ll need a palate cleanser. Here are some reading antidotes to suck the poison out.
Women Who Run with the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes:
This entire book on the myths and legends of the wild women (and the men who try to tame her) will more or less spray lemon juice into your wounds, and then stitch you back up without real anaesthetics and then liberally Neosporin you (emotionally). But it’s fine, you’ll be a glorious emotional Frankenstein afterwards. As far as I’m concerned there is a Before-I-read-WWRWW self and an After-reading-WWRWW self and they could not be any more different.
All About Love by bell hooks:
Sure, sure; I read this book while accidentally tripping on an edible while babysitting for an Australian family. Long story short: I thought the green line on the flipped-over chocolate bar wrapper was symbolizing how it was “organic”, when actually it would just cause me to “trip balls.” I got so high I thought I was dead. This actually might be the most ideal reading experience for this title. Full of revelations on all types of love (and not just the high-horse pedestal of romantic love), AAL will make you mull over the origins of love, the deserving of it, the act of it as a constant practice in public and private spheres. You might just need an edible??
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez:
Um, spoiler alert: I think everyone just wants someone who will sail away on a cholera boat with them until the end of their days, at least that's what I put on my Hinge profile (with moderate to very little success).
Further Reading: Alain de Botton (The Course of Love), Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate), any Jojo Moyes novel.
In closing: Who are your favorite fuccbois? Fuccwomen? Softgirls?
I binge-read A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers this week, which made me day dream about another imaginary class I’d be horned to teach: food and sexuality in contemporary literary fiction. Think about it: Binge-eating as art! Sex as a colonization of resources! Suppression of taste and hunger as patriarchal construct!!!
The premise of this one is just so deliciously demented. It’s American Psycho-meets-90’s“Foodie”culture, but with a female food writer as narrator as she dispatches on sex, food, and psychopathy from behind bars. Five stars.
Okay, also fine: here are my top books of 2020. I ended up panic-reading 46 books in total, which feels about right.
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo
One to Watch - Kate Stayman-London
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (my first time?!)
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Beach Read by Emily Henry
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
Tie: Autumn by Ali Smith / The Bed Moved by Rebecca Schiff
Best American Food Writing 2019 ed. Samin Nosrat
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck (Steinbeck was ...hot?)