Sad Girl Novel (Pip Finkemeyer, Ultimo)

When we first meet aspiring writer Kim Mueller, she’s taking a train through Berlin, on her way to see her therapist. She’s wondering if she’s ‘talented or deluded’. She has spent months trying to birth a novel, while her hyper-competent best friend Bel has given literal birth to a baby. At first, Kim seems like the typical modern sad girl: she has romanticised being lonely, self-conscious and anxious. She gets high off the ping of a notification on her phone and says things like ‘everything he said felt very @ me’. But as we follow Kim through Frankfurt, New York and on to Marrakesh, her character grows more and more complex, and her friendship with Bel more and more fraught. This is a captivating novel from debut author Pip Finkemeyer. The plot is circuitous, mirroring the thought process of the mercurial Kim as she circles in and out of reality. Finkemeyer has an irreverent voice that will have you reaching for a pen to underline every second sentence. Some examples: ‘With time I was glad that I had let my desire to write seep out of me accidentally and without my control, like a fart’; ‘Buses were proof there was no God.’ Sad Girl Novel will appeal to literary fiction readers who enjoyed Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Coco McGrath is a freelance editor and former bookseller. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews