In both books, the risk of falling back on raked over, twee, trope-laden Millennial pastiche is high. Is there anything new about a privileged (white, we presume) 22-year-old in Brooklyn procrastinating on her collection of personal essays by updating her People Using 10-Color Pens in Offices Tumblr? But that risk is, at this point, practically a prerequisite for the genre in which Ulman and Schiff operate.

Theirs is a literary ecosystem fueled by the dream of achieving viral acclaim—of appealing to the masses by parading one’s exquisite, insecure individuality. The heroes of this ecosystem, in movies and on TV shows as in books, are the popular girls whose fame and celebrity come from essays like “Girl Crush: That Time I Was Almost a Lesbian, Then Vomited” (which appears in Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham’s #1 bestselling collection) and from frank exposure of bespoke tattoos on cable television. Schiff and Ulman aren’t mimicking Dunham so much as they’re gleefully—fondly—spoofing the predictability of her brand. As the critic Harold Rosenberg wrote, “There is a mass culture of ‘individuals,’ too, obviously.”

If anything, this particular mass culture of individuals—the booming market for such girly, arty angst—has upped the ante for young women who want to write, as Ulman put it in an interview, original work “that centralizes the secret voices and perspectives of young female characters.” What rescues Schiff and Ulman from stale generational stereotypes comes as something of a surprise: They supplement their 20-something characters’ bellyaching with the more forgivably immature musings of even younger voices. In both books, teenagers—and the reactions they provoke in those around them—steal the show.

Most of these girls sense the inevitability of a young adulthood marked by awkwardness and bad sex: That, after all, is what the culture has told them young adulthood is. Yet it never occurs to them that they’re victims, and the last thing they want to be mistaken for is ingénues. They are wry and ambitious protagonists, and Ulman and Schiff present them without the kind of “touchy-feely girl empowerment talk” (in the withering words of one of Ulman’s teenagers) more moralizing authors might serve up.

Wry and ambitious themselves, both writers offer rich comedies of manners that take in not just the girls, but also the mystified boys and authority figures in their orbit, the head-shaking teachers and the parents who double as anxious chauffeurs. Schiff’s teenage girls know the boys around them are just as lost. “We all aspired to orgasm,” one narrator says matter-of-factly, “but were afraid of our GPAs slipping. Everything counted. We aced Sex Ed.” Throughout the book, her sparse, poetic paragraphs are packed with forceful wit. Ulman, whose stories build more slowly, excels at dialogue and narrative. The more you get to know her characters, the funnier it is to witness their verbal code-switching as they navigate between nosy parents, fumbling love interests, and trusted friends.