In Defense of the Weird Girls: Writing as a Love Letter to the Inner Child
by Arts Editor Cat Casey
Maybe it’s because I was born in July, but I have always felt younger once it starts to get warm. Girlhood is remembered as a freeze pop staining my fingers red, a scalp sunburn hidden underneath a camp bandana, and the grit of gravel stuck in a scraped knee.
Coincidentally, I find a lot of what I write takes place in the season between girlhood and womanhood; the last gasps of summer that give way into the biting chill of autumn and the hostile barren of winter. It’s sunny, you feel warm down to your growing bones that will betray you by this time next year, you only know your body to feed mosquitos, and your only concern is when your mother will call you home for dinner. This is the most magic my life ever was, and it’s a shame I wouldn’t know that until it was long over.
I was not very kind to my little summer girl for a long time. I was embarrassed by her without ever really letting myself digest why that was. Why was I so ashamed of the girl I once was, who was so like me in the worst ways; loud, selfish, rude, crybaby thing that she was. Most damning of all, she was weird. So very strange! The kind of kid who should have been tested but wasn’t, who talked too close and too loud to faces, who spent an entire school year obsessed with Abraham Lincoln (don’t ask,) and who never noticed any of these things. I was mad at her for that most of all, the fact that if she had just looked up and saw how offputting she was, she could have just stopped. It could have been that easy.
The thing is; once you start writing in earnest; actually doing the humiliating thing and admitting that you want to try, you learn early on that characters have to be weird. Every so often you’ll read a novel where the main character is bland as dry toast and the world around them is what energizes the narrative, but it’s rare. Furthermore, it’s still pretty boring. It’s more common that you have a rotten kid who thinks everyone’s out to get him, who’s obsessed with swearing and youth and spends the entire book monologuing about all the ways in which he’s normal and everyone else is strange until he spills the beans that he’s been in a sanatorium the whole time and there was never really a Catcher or any Rye.
Girls don’t really get to be weird, or they do until a point. Women certainly aren’t weird, and if they are, it’s a mark of sexual deviancy. Women aren’t weird, they’re freaks. Girls who grow up strange grow out of it. There is no feminine version of Holden Caulfield, despite the fact that there is no one meaner and more prone to a self deprecating inner monologue than a thirteen year old girl.
Even when women get to be even slightly strange; she’s only there to manic pixie dream girl through some sad boy great American novel. It’s not even limited to the page - I too have fallen victim to being turned into an idea in several creative ventures - never good and always uncomfortable. Still, the dream girl is only weird enough to capture the attention of a man, and nothing more than that. Where are all the true little weirdo freak girls?
Two years ago, I found myself at the beginning of my MFA program writing about girls. This wasn’t new - I only ever really write about girls, even when they’re women. But as I kept writing them, they kept getting stranger and stranger. They’d read bibles to worms, sneak out of camp to buy Kotex pads, let men pay them for a chance to rub their feet (which end up being too ugly, too real, for fetish fantasy.) They were loud, selfish, rude, sensitive things. They were introspective to the point of detriment. They were so, so lonely, and so very mean to themselves. And each of them seemed to be chasing the same thing; the ghost of the girl they gave up to become a woman. I had spent so long mistaking grief for anger that I almost forgot how much freedom there is in girlhood. Everything I write seems to be an attempt to recapture the blissful ignorance of the time before a girl is taught what her body means, what her presence invites. When weird is just weird.
Cat Casey is the Arts Editor of Barnstorm Journal and a fiction candidate in the UNH MFA program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Good Life Review and So to Speak Literary Journal, among others. She is a certified weird girl.