It is not lost on me, the irony of reading The Idiot as my clock reads midnight: I have work in 8 hours. But I am captivated. Elif Batuman’s fictional debut is unique in its mediocrity—the writing is glorious, with razor wit and profound observations about the hurdles that come with being an “average” (the main character did attend Harvard) college student. But its main character is recognizable—reading it is like looking in a mirror. Selin, an 18 year old college freshman, is unlikable.
The book is not plot driven; it reads like a collection of vignettes. We follow Selin as she desperately tries to navigate her emotional attachment to the most unfashionable coat in Boston, her dining hall dinners of cereal and pizza (classic girl dinner!), and 3 am summonings from a boy in her Russian class who, predictably, is convinced his opinions on academia are Socratian in importance.
Everywhere I turn, the media I consume paints a lack of dignity that looks an awful lot like a portrait—a portrait that connects me to a larger community of women who have made equally unaesthetic, or ratty, choices.
I can feel my clock judging me, so I take a break from reading. I stare down the length of my bed at a pile of worn-but-not-dirty clothes stacked indelicately on top of my blankets. On my right sits a bowl of popcorn coated in enough butter substitute to make any medical practitioner cringe. I’m suddenly reminded of a recent Washington Post article about “Rat Girl Summer.” Everywhere I turn, the media I consume paints a lack of dignity that looks an awful lot like a portrait—a portrait that connects me to a larger community of women who have made equally unaesthetic, or ratty, choices.
Idolizing pleasure, The Idiot’s protagonist is a fictional reflection of the same women who find liberation in “Rat Girl Summer.” Rat Girl Summer gifts us the freedom to indulge in unattractive food (a cosmic brownie) or food that could make us unattractive (also a cosmic brownie). We are allowed to scamper around town on a whim, indulging in moments that we may pay for the next morning when we peel ourselves off of a drool-stained pillowcase, ripe for rotting. Suddenly, my life doesn’t have to be feminine to be mainstream—I see myself in both a New York Times bestseller and millions of TikToks.
But language holds history—and femininity continues to invoke a distinct mental image of delicacy, daintiness, and controlled beauty that can burden those trying to exude it.
Many modern feminists have fought to redefine femininity within recent years. By expanding what qualifies as feminine, we think it will make gender roles less constricting. But language holds history—and femininity continues to invoke a distinct mental image of delicacy, daintiness, and controlled beauty that can burden those trying to exude it. Tangibly, femininity is an expensive t-shirt, sunkissed blushed cheeks, and soft lip oil worn on the first day of class. It is not the inherited pair of Nike spandex shorts I wore as pajama bottoms the night before or the UVA baseball cap that hides my hair so I can avoid taking a shower, as I’m late to that first day of class.
I am always a woman. And yet, despite our best linguistic activism, I am not always feminine. So we create new languages.
For so long, both women in fiction and in social media spaces have been adored for walking the line between relatable and unachievable. In the same way that we love the girl-next-door motif, we picture college women as ideologically balanced: their playful girlish romanticism negates the chaos and ugliness born from needing life experience before you know which choices are ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ What is thrilling about The Idiot and “Rat Girl Summer” is how they reject the cute, ornamental nature of young women in favor of describing the real. Elif Batuman preserves Selin’s agency as a person, her worthiness of having a story told as even she, an 18 year old, mundane idiot, makes terrible, disagreeable decisions.
Maybe today, I am not feminine. But I am always a girl.
I, too, have taken classes much too advanced for a first year because I liked the title. I have convinced myself that time could change a self-obsessed mind. I have, out of desperation, eaten a dining hall dinner of pizza and cereal.
Reviewers of The Idiot that line its Good Reads profile are exasperated, claiming that Selin’s unlikability and pointlessness draws them away from the book. I say it's revolutionary. It is a part of a canon of new languages that, while not altering femininity, change what modes of being are visually acceptable. They construct gender in a way that is more reflective of women’s lived experiences, instead of promoting a theoretical idea of the female experience that, while sometimes achievable, always feels just out of reach. Maybe today, I am not feminine. But I am always a girl.
