Free Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay

curse on Mister. I say, “I once told you I was going to become Miss America. This isn’t the Miss America crown, but it’s pretty damn close.”
    As a black girl, as a Haitian girl, I was not supposed to see myself in the Sweet Valley High books, but I did. Perhaps it was because I too lived in the suburbs, perhaps it was because I was looking for the way toward a perfect life and becoming Miss America, but I felt the Sweet Valley stories deeply. I read and reread the books countless times. The drama, recycled plots, and ludicrous circumstances spoke to me profoundly. This may also explain why in high school I become utterly devoted to Beverly Hills 90210 , which took the Sweet Valley High formula and elevated it to high art. Sweet Valley Confidential reminded me of my most awkward years and the silly promise I made to a silly group of kids. The book reminded me of the solace, escape, and quiet joy I found in Sweet Valley. Some experiences are universal. A girl is a girl whether she lives in West Omaha or Sweet Valley. Books are often far more than just books.

Garish, Glorious Spectacles
    The green girl likes to watch herself suffer.
    —K ATE Z AMBRENO , Green Girl
    In her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble , Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over. She writes,
    Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.
    While our conceptions of gender have evolved since the publication of Gender Trouble , there is a lot to be said for Butler’s theory, particularly when it comes to the ways in which women, knowingly or unknowingly, perform femininity and the ways in which women are sometimes trapped by how they are expected to perform their gender.
    In popular culture, the world often feels like a stage on which women perform, and no novel in recent memory has captured this performance and how fraught it can be better than Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl .
    The best word to describe Green Girl is “searing.” The novel is at once a compelling narrative about a young American woman living in London and an indictment of what ails our culture—rampant consumerism, shallow human connection, and, most of all, the cult of beauty and the unbearable and impossible constraints of gender—a culture where women wear their faces as masks, their bodies as shields. Throughout the novel, the green girl is as foolishly bold as she is vulnerable. She inhabits her contradictions in deeply seductive ways.
    If, as Butler believes, gender is a performance, Green Girl is a novel about a young woman who is learning how to perform her femininity, who is learning the power of it, the fragility. Her education is, at times, painful. The green girl is as vicious as she is vulnerable, and Zambreno deftly exposes both this viciousness and vulnerability in her protagonist. Green Girl reveals the intimate awareness many women have about the ways they are on display when they move in public, about the ways they perform their roles as women: “The awareness on the train, the fashion show. The men are always looking, always looking with their flirty eyes. One can shop but does not have to buy. But sometimes life in the spotlight can be difficult. Sometimes she wants to be invisible.”
    In Green Girl , Ruth is playing the part of girl. Her performance, at times, stands in place of her identity. As Ruth realizes, “Sometimes she is struck by the sense that she is someone else’s character, that she is saying someone else’s lines.” The green girl also does