The Novels Of My Youth Encouraged The Myth Of The Manic Pixie Dream Girl
As many young millennials reflect on their preteen and teenage years with the influx of early 2000s nostalgia i.e. the Gossip Girl reboot, Hulu’s comedy PEN15, the return of low rise jeans and Ed Hardy - I’ve found myself reminiscing on the media I used to consume, particularly what I was reading in middle school.
My friends and I, stuck between childhood and teenagehood, were searching for characters and stories that made us feel represented, but also modeled who we should aspire to be. What we found in this search was a trope that’s existed as long as media has, but was coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in 2007, the “manic pixie dream girl.” We were obsessed with being outside the mainstream to a competitive degree, so much so that we’d put down other young women in the hopes of standing out, swearing we were “not like other girls.”
The “manic pixie dream girl” (MPDG) describes a literary and media archetype - the quirky, whimsical woman who serves the primary purpose of bettering the male lead, opening his eyes to the beauty in the world around him. She often struggles with her mental health but that only adds to her charm and mystique. Some notable MPDG’s in film include Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.
She tends to be a white, cis, heterosexual woman who is always pretty. “She has to be really pretty, but she can’t know she’s pretty, she can’t try to be pretty,” said Marni Bates, a young adult novelist.
I know we weren’t alone in this manic pixie dream girl obsession. @Amylovattt on TikTok started a trend of divulging the most manic pixie dream girl thing she did as a teen and her comments section blew up with embarrassing but adorable examples. My friend Izzy remembers she became a vegetarian and dyed her hair orange out of a desire to be different. I would doodle with colorful Sharpies on my Converse, and thought it was “more comfortable” to sit on the floor when everyone else would be in chairs at a party. It wasn’t.
These self-determined “quirks” were inspired by characters like Stargirl in Jerry Spinelli’s novel of the same name or Alaska in Looking for Alaska. It was 2007 and my 12-year-old binary-thinking brain scanned the aisle at the local bookstore for signals about what I should be reading.
I remember a wall of pink filled with books about middle or high school dramas like The Clique series or Gossip Girl; authors focused on young love like Sarah Dessen or the trendy series the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson by Louise Rennison. Another wall would be devoted to darker books, usually with black covers and a simple title. Go Ask Alice, of course. The Crank series which focused on a high school student’s addiction to crystal meth. Fantasy books with iridescent dragons on the cover and medieval style fonts like Eragon.
There were quirky books scattered throughout the aisle, unusual names that drew me in, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and It’s Kind of a Funny Story. These felt like the “indie” books, the ones that felt like our own because they centered around a character who was unique and special in the eyes of the male lead.
By avoiding the mainstream and searching for something that would set us apart we were rejecting the late 90s and early 2000s pop stars we grew up with, replacing them with Vampire Weekend and MGMT. Garden State and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out shortly before we started middle school, and 500 Days of Summer bookended it. The obsession with being “indie,” knowing the band before anyone else did, taking polaroids, vintage shopping, Nylon Magazine, and American Apparel were in full swing.
Despite the narrow scope of characters most authors created, the female character who was “different” made us feel seen. Nicki Sassoon, one of my best friends from elementary and middle school, said that although most of these characters were white, she felt that as a “short Jewish thick Latina,” she was represented by the “outcast” mold. These books should have done better and included more representations and discussions of race, but Nicki’s feelings speak to how eager we were to see ourselves in the characters we were given.
Alaska from Looking For Alaska, Stargirl in Stargirl, Noelle from It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Sam in The Perks of Being a Wallflower were some of the most influential female characters for my friends and me. Interestingly, each of these books were told through the male lead’s perspective and written by men.
Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl author, described his MPDG through the lead character Leo’s eyes: “She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day. She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh.” We all wanted to be that quirky, magical girl who could appeal to the guy of our preteen dreams.
Longtime YA reader and recent author, Diana Wiener Rosengard explained, “We all want to be special, we all want to be the hero of our own narrative. The sad part of becoming a real adult is recognizing that you’re probably not going to be the hero of any story, you’re just gonna live an average life. But I think it’s important for young people to dream about what they want to be, to think about all the different places they can go.”
Izzy explained, “I think I liked this trope of ‘She’s not like other girls because she’s really interesting and deep.’” She continued, “I liked that in these novels the MPDG finds a guy that’s equally like that, and he’s really intrigued by her. I was like, ‘That’s motivating.’”
These sweet, silly attempts at being quirky were often in the hopes of standing out to boys we liked, but the problematic side of what these characters encouraged was a rejection of other young women around us. Izzy said these books, “bred internalized sexism amongst women, between each other - this trivializing of anyone who’s at all basic or mainstream.”
The Clique series did this in a more overt manner. Nicki expressed, “The way they modeled intergroup relations especially, there was very much a pitting women against each other. Like, ‘this is what you should expect to encounter in high school.’ That set up a framework or a model of how certain people behaved.” We were expected to fight, gossip, and reject our peers, often in the name of landing a date with a 12-year-old boy.
Having the urge to stand out, to be noticed, to find love, these are all worthy and understandable goals, especially for preteens. I’m both grateful for and resentful of the characters that inspired my friends and me. On their own, they were powerful young women who saw the world through a unique lens. Unfortunately their complexity and agency ended once they served their purpose, expanding the mind and heart of the young male lead.
Revisiting this era of my preteen years I remember feeling giddy in the bookstore on Ventura Boulevard at 12 years old, so independent, allowed to choose whichever books I wanted. Despite insecurities and awkward moments, I felt confident that I was unique, special, important - that I was just like these “manic pixie dream girls.” I wish I could tell myself to hang on to that confidence that is so aggressively stripped from young girls. I wish I could tell her that it was enough to be my own dream girl - not in pursuit of a boy, but for myself.
