When I was 16 and studying The Crucible, I hated the girls in Arthur Miller’s play: those terrifying teenage beasts who organised themselves into a ferocious pack to bring down their prey. Held in check by the Puritans’ repressive strictures, the girls’s sexual urges were perverted and projected into charges of witchcraft hurled against neighbours. I didn’t want to be associated with that sort of female ferocity. Now, I think that was the point.

The only teenage girls I ever read about in literature classes were powerless; except for their sex, which we were made to understand made men weak. Abigail Williams and John Proctor. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. When I graduated from my high school in 1980, teenage girls were being used as messy political weapons by the US’s nascent religious right, to build its power. Our access to birth control, to abortion, and our rights to have sex as freely as young men, became one of the major issues around which the “Moral Majority” organised itself. As a young woman, I wrote articles about Planned Parenthood, I escorted friends to clinics to get contraceptives, but I never talked about my own femaleness. There was a political conversation happening about my body, but it was not one I could read about outside newspapers. Later, I would discover the writing of Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood, but at that time I felt alone.



‘Preternatural’ … Sissy Spacek in the film adaptation of Carrie, by Stephen King. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Redbank

When it does appear in literature written by men, the depiction of “femaleness” too often veers into problematic territory. A woman’s sexual drive is reduced to something animalistic and strange – think Philip Roth’s Consuela Castillo in The Dying Animal, “superclassically the fertile female of our mammalian species ... caroming about with her eyes shut, off in a child’s game of her own”. Or revolting and alien, like in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides: “He felt her clammy shins, her hot knees, her bristly thighs, and then with terror he put his finger in the ravenous mouth of the animal leashed below her waist.”

Indeed, a thread of fascinated revulsion with women runs through Eugenides’s tale of five sisters who all take their own lives over the course of a year. The chorus of adolescent boys who narrate the book remark on the sisters as “creatures”, the youngest one a “deranged harlot”. Menstruation is elevated to some mysterious blood rite: “In the trash can was one Tampax spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon sisters. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something.”

Eugenides is not alone in portraying female puberty as something preternatural; the most iconic example is Stephen King’s Carrie, when the sheltered Carrie gets her period for the first time and becomes the butt of her schoolmates’ jibes:

“PER-iod!” It was becoming a chant, an incantation. Someone in the background (perhaps Hargensen again, Sue couldn’t tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling, “Plug it up!” with hoarse, uninhibited abandon.

Far too often, very ordinary phenomena like female sexual desire or the onset of puberty are elevated by male writers to something remarkable, frightening. Young women are either the animalistic bearers of the erotic urge, or bodily reminders of how sin enters the world. And other elements of female adolescence not associated with sex – like the intensity of friendships or familial bonds at that stage of life – are left off the page, or reduced to dramatic displays of hormonal cattiness.

One of the side-effects of locking women, or people of colour, or members of the working class, out of the publication market is that when those people appear in literature written by authors who are not them, they may not recognise themselves. When critics have been schooled to recognise “art” through representations of the status quo, new works from authors outside of that end up classified as “lesser”– think of the genre labels “ethnic literature”, “chick lit”, “popular fiction”. “Watching boys do stuff” is the stuff of literature – and reading male writers who view women as something alien has been the flipside of that literature for a long time.

What a relief it was, then, to read two books this summer in which two female authors wrote about teenage girls doing stuff: Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire and Emma Cline’s The Girls. Both books feature at their heart the intensity of teenage girl friendship, that love that got me through the combination of adolescent hormones and bumping up against the strictures of class and gender that US high schools present.

Authors Robin Wasserman, left, and Emma Cline. Composite: Robin Wasserman/Getty Images

Wasserman’s Girls on Fire is set in early 1990s rust belt Pennsylvania, about best friends Lacey and Dex. While it is a mystery, the true strength of the novel comes from the honesty of the girls’ portrayal. When Dex describes her friendship with Lacey, I wanted to search for my long-lost high-school friend and read her this passage:

[O]ther people were irrelevant to us; that they existed only for the pleasure of dismissing them, simulacra of consciousness, walking and talking and pretending at an inner life but hollow inside. Nothing like us … The only real, certified and confirmed, is you and me.” Wasserman nails that tone of adolescent intellectual bravado and insecurity that drove so many of my own teenage conversations.

When The Girls came out, almost all critics focused on Cline’s re-creation of the events leading up to the Helter Skelter murders. But it was not Cline’s imagining of life inside Manson’s compound that made me squirm, it was the evocation of the mother-daughter relationship that made me want to call my own mother and apologise. When character Eve suspects her father is having an affair, her anger is instead directed at her mother,

who’d let it happen, who’d been as soft and malleable as dough. Handing money over, cooking dinner every night, and no wonder my father had wanted something else … My mother must have known and stayed anyway, and what did that mean about love?”

Cline’s depiction of the scorn and pity some teenagers feel towards their mothers is painfully true; she truly sticks her finger in that wound and digs around.

The Girl on the Train; Gone Girl; Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: much has been made of the “girl” titles in the past few years. Some have attempted to place such writing in its own category of literature, as if writing about women – again – can be lumped into one large pile and undifferentiated because women are the main players. But The Girls and Girls on Fire, for starters, should be discussed as works of literary fiction that contribute to our understanding of what it feels like to be a teenage girl or young woman. I want to see men write books like these; truly, I hope male writers who wish to write about young women use Wasserman and Cline as models – just for starters – and make bids to free young women from the literary occult where they’ve been hidden.