How is the messy girl trend working for you? Have you been “smoking like a chimney” and “pulling a Britney every other week”, as the lyrics to Lola Young’s inescapable anthem Messy have it? Perhaps you’ve been channelling Lena Dunham’s sitcom Too Much, about an American hot mess who moves to London, where she overshares, overcares, accidentally takes way too much ketamine and does cocaine with her boss?
Either way, the female-centred media seem to be in agreement. Perfectionism and people-pleasing are out. This year, it’s all about being flawed and raw and a little bit proud of one’s arrested development. “I want to be me,” sings Young, in defiance of the boyfriend who shames her for failing to fold her clothes. “Is that not allowed?”
Not only allowed but encouraged. Publishers have caught on to the commercial potential of messiness, which was selected by users of BookTok, TikTok’s books community, as one of the defining characteristics of an emerging category of fiction that’s increasingly dominating the bestseller charts: new adult.
While young adult (YA) fiction is generally aimed at readers aged 12 to 18, new adult (NA) finds its audience in 18 to 30-year-olds, sometimes older. Thanks to TikTok’s voracious readers, it’s now a popular hashtag and one of the fastest-growing areas of the fiction market. It’s no coincidence that 25 to 34-year-olds are the only cohort in the forthcoming State of the Nation study, put together by the charity The Reading Agency, who report an increase in reading for pleasure over the past year. The number of people who read regularly jumped from 42 per cent to 55 per cent, while all other age demographics read less.
NA novels cater to readers, mostly young women, who are stuck in a messy transitional stage and still haven’t figured things out. They are people who hoovered up the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games series and now want stories that read like YA but with spicier romance plots and characters struggling in their first jobs. Think of the megaselling romantasy novels by the likes of Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros, which serve up lots of sex in Hogwartsesque settings. Or Taylor Jenkins Reid’s emotionally charged Atmosphere, a love story between two female Nasa astronauts trying to find their feet. The genre’s highbrow poster woman is RF Kuang, 29, whose fantasies Babel and Katabasis combine a breathlessly excitable tone more familiar from children’s fiction with dark academia settings, weighty questions of history and philosophy, and bursts of ultraviolence.
Romantasy fans at an event with Rebecca Yarros, one of the genre’s leading lights
CJ RIVERA/INVISION/AP
Rachel Denwood, the managing director of Simon & Schuster’s children’s division, confirms that the publisher is moving “emphatically” towards NA and will soon launch “a bold new global initiative in this space.”
But new adult is more than a publishing buzzword. It serves to highlight the emergence of a new life phase as well. In previous generations, an 18-year-old might have had little in common with a 30-year-old. In this economy, however, the 30-year-old is perhaps just as likely to be living under their parents’ roof. These readers are old enough to have had a few chastening experiences with class A drugs, Tinder hook-ups and crappy landlords, but are still finding adulthood frightening and unrewarding. They still crave some of the comforts of childhood.
Sharmaine Lovegrove, a former publishing executive at Hachette who has just established herself as an agent, says she’s been fascinated by the emergence of NA. “It’s a shorthand for stories about trying to find independence,” she says. “It’s where your parents are still in your life, a sort of suspended adulthood, and you’re trying to find your way in the world but struggling to take action.”
Lovegrove points out that this tricky period of finding your way in the world, buying a property and starting a family, used to represent about five years of your life: “Now it’s more like 15 years.”
Teenagers had to be invented too. Before the 1950s, no one really thought of 13 to 19-year-olds as a distinct category of consumer. Then marketers figured out their commercial power and suddenly a whole industry sprung up to console and exploit them.
What does this latest development tell us about the way society has changed since then? When you read fiction addressed to past generations of twentysomething women — Barbara Pym’s novels about wry spinsters, Laurie Colwin’s charming comedies of 1970s singledom, even the terminally messy Bridget Jones — there is always a romance about being part of the adult world. These are books that immediately put some distance between you and your teenage self.
Laurie Colwin’s books include Goodbye Without Leaving and Family Happiness
ALAMY
There are certainly modern writers who capture this time with depth and maturity; there’s a reason Sally Rooney is so popular, and critically acclaimed too. But the presiding message of much of the NA fiction is that there aren’t really any rewards — in the real world, at least. There isn’t really much in being an adult to look forward to.