Milk Fed, a new novel by The Pisces and So Sad Today author Melissa Broder, finds a similarly lost protagonist implicating others in her existential spirals. To paraphrase those Smokey the Bear PSAs: Only you can prevent self-sabotage. But what would you expect? If there’s a shared takeaway from all these books, it’s that you can’t expect others to save you.

All of them end up failing the characters. Others are explicitly sexual, as with Peters’ protagonists, Reese and Amy. Some of these one-sided devotional relationships radiate with an unspoken eroticism. They dump their decision-making onto unsuspecting acquaintances-their lovers, bosses, employees and friends-whom they recast as all-knowing oracles with the power to save them from themselves. Understandably terrified at that mortifying prospect, they look to others to do the work for them. In these novels, the central characters-all fuck-ups to varying degrees, all women save for Ess’ titular Darryl (though I do feel that’s debatable)-are faced with the daunting but necessary task of trying to figure out who they are. Erotic projection plays a key role in Raven Leilani’s Luster Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and Jackie Ess’ Darryl. To make the love interests as fully rounded as the men who’d fallen for them would have undermined the very thing that those films were trying to explore in the first place! Has the male art defender logged on? Oh, god, I think she has.Ī growing body of contemporary fiction might very well redeem this trope as a worthy site of artistic introspection that all genders can partake in, raising the manic pixie dream girl up from the depths to which we’ve flung her. These movies were all about falling for the idea of a person and clinging to that abstraction long after she’s gone. The creators of aughtsy hipster romcoms like Garden State, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 500 Days of Summer were blasted on the feminist blogs for years over their purported failure to make their so-called “manic pixie dream girls”-played by Natalie Portman, Kate Winslet and Zooey Deschanel, respectively-as well-rounded as the men at their centre, a line of criticism that makes zero sense if you actually think about it. One of the worst transgressions has to be the reframing of erotic projection as a distinctly male pursuit that automatically cheapens whatever work in which it’s found. There have been many crimes committed under the TV tropesification of criticism-that is, the conflation of simply observing tropes in media with having mounted an actual critique based on that observation.

Milk fed a novel