https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a61533105/sad-boy-literature/
created by TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK on 21/02/2025 at 19:49 UTC
178 upvotes, 28 top-level comments (showing 25)
Comment by Overhazard10 at 21/02/2025 at 23:52 UTC*
159 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I need to read this article again, really chew on it some more, but initially it comes off like another "If men just read more FICTION, everything would be fine!" Article, except this time it's "sad boy fiction".
These articles always make the assumption that all fiction is innately progressive ,when it's not, and the assumption that all men have the same level of media literacy, when they don't.
Actually, Andrew Boryga wrote an article about this on his substack[1], his article asks if we actually want fiction and or vulnerability from the perspective of straight working class men because it might be off-putting to the upper class women who mostly buy fiction novels. Also, I listened to his debut novel Victim, it's pretty good.
1: https://borywrites.substack.com/p/do-we-really-want-more-male-vulnerability
I have grown very weary of this moralizing about reading. I know there's this pervasive idea that if we could just get men to read more fiction and less hustle culture they won't fall prey to the manosphere, but it just doesn't hold water when put up to scrutiny.
Comment by JaStrCoGa at 21/02/2025 at 20:27 UTC
114 upvotes, 3 direct replies
It seems the writer partially answers this question with the “manosphere” situation. Males might be too concerned with starting businesses, acquiring wealth, “self improvement”, and fitness to actually learn how or be willing to communicate their stories in a manner fit for the novel format.
Granted, some may feel that their stories are not important considering the focus on the experiences of women in recent years.
Others might prefer to be entertained by playing video games and watching shows and streamers instead of developing other traditional skills.
Writing is also difficult, for those who have not developed a process, and takes so much time to draft and revise.
I’m Curious to see what other people think.
Comment by Triple_Hache at 21/02/2025 at 21:30 UTC
27 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Just read any classical russian novel ?
Comment by snake944 at 22/02/2025 at 08:16 UTC*
18 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Isn't this just a matter of visibility. Demand is low, so very little incentive for publishers to push it and so you'll rarely see them pop up unless you go looking for them. I am quite sure there are tons of books that fit this bill that are being written (and a lot of commenters are putting in recommendations here) but they are never gonna be pushed heavily.
This is like my friend asking idk.. where are all the digital wargames. As someone that runs in that circle they are there, they are being made and I'll point you towards them but don't expect them to hit the front page of steam. You can't equate visibility to supply or a lack of it.
Edit:by demand I mean the kind of demand which would force publishers to market it heavily in major outlets like for example fantasy romance and all that.
Comment by songsforatraveler at 21/02/2025 at 23:29 UTC
40 upvotes, 2 direct replies
These articles are dumb, I’m sorry. Men don’t write about being sad??? The disaffected youth trope is everywhere in male media. Maybe not always explicitly presented as depression. One of my favorite video games of all time has a depressed main character (final fantasy 7). One of the most popular and famous anime of all time has a depressed main character (neon genesis evangelion). Are there loads of depressed older man stories? True Detective? Idk I always feel like these articles are written by someone who just “feels” like male media is missing something but really just doesn’t pay attention.
Comment by NeonNKnightrider at 21/02/2025 at 21:18 UTC*
26 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This reminds me of a similar article I’ve seen on this sub before, (Edit: Here it is)[1] talking about dating columns in blogs or journals, and how men don’t write it, and the observation that a large part of it is probably because a man talking at length about his dating life would be seen as either whiny (if he doesn’t succeed) or arrogant and bragging (if he does).
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/s/fWHDnXmVit
Comment by generic230 at 21/02/2025 at 21:18 UTC
87 upvotes, 7 direct replies
But, has there *ever* been an era of sad boy literature? You cite Holden Caulfield but, aside from that, historically, male authors write about adventure, espionage, war. And there’s a whole category of brilliantly written “sad middle aged man” literature. Great literature about men facing the idea of what their life has become and if it’s worth it. James Joyce’s “The Dead” being one of the most moving and profound.
But, honestly, can media stop using female points of perspective to decide it is a deficit in the male world? I mean do men NEED sad boy literature? Maybe they don’t.
Comment by Spot__Pilgrim at 22/02/2025 at 04:46 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Making an inference from my own experience as a young man who has been interested in writing for a long time, it may be because there are far fewer young men writing fiction narratives and getting published. I used to go to writing camps in the summer as a teen and there were regularly way more girls there, so if any of us at that camp have grown up and become writers it stands to reason that basically all of them would be female if we generalize that to the entire world. It's also because lots of the men who wrote the books that guys my age grew up with, like Gordon Korman and Kenneth Oppel, are still around and writing for the next generation of young men. Lots of the books I read that are about men my age are written by older guys reliving their youth or they were written by old guys who wrote them when they were young.
Comment by forestpunk at 22/02/2025 at 08:24 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
As someone who reads and writes constantly, that also thinks about culture a great deal I think about this all the time. I feel like it's due to numerous factors, some of which seem rather unpopular to talk about.
1. Girls and women who are seen as sad or tragic are pitiable and worthy of support. Boys and men who are seen as sad or tragic are seen as pathetic, at best, and most likely dangerous. It's telling that the author mentions Holden Caulfield, as guys who openly identify with or even just appreciate him as a good character are seen as manchildren, at best, and quite possibly latent psychopaths. Later on in the same article, the author mentions *Infinite Jest* as a "sign of misogyny." So not only are men who write complicated characters seen as monsters, you're implicated if you even admit to reading them.
2. Even though we've dismantled a ton of social rules, mores, norms, and regulations, I feel like they still exist. Others have talked about guys leaning into self-improvement and the grind mindset. It's just a theory, but I wonder how much of different attitudes are due to the lack of a social safety net? I'd have to find numbers to say for certain, but in my anecdotal experience, women I have known have been far more likely to get degrees that aren't guaranteed to pay well, or are almost guaranteed to *not* pay well? I truly wonder how much of this behavior is due to the possibility of having a spouse subsidize their lifestyle down the line?
I feel like if you're a guy, unless you're really, **really** hot, you're not going to have a family or life partner, end of story.
3. I feel like that second tendency creates this death spiral, where guys are so busy hustling they're not reading, so a vast majority of the book industry is made up of women. If women are buying books, of course publishers are going to try to appeal to women. Which then creates this weird dichotomy where writing about a tragic male character could be seen as sympathizing with a toxic or problematic character or something.
Just some theories.
Comment by SquareJerk1066 at 21/02/2025 at 20:36 UTC
23 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Not to be smarmy, but right here: https://x.com/guyinyourmfa?lang=en&mx=2
I, a cis, white male, was moderately involved in lit fiction spaces about a decade ago. Male vulnerability is pretty universally seen as tone-deaf, imposing, demanding, infantile. There are certainly unempathetic men who embody the Guy in Your MFA, the ones misunderstand everyone around them and insert themselves as the hero of every story and situation, who think they're *oh so brilliant and misunderstood*, when they're really misogynistic hacks. The problem was that this archetype became so ingrained in the psyche of literary types that it has become a knee-jerk response to any male emotionally or vulnerability.
I was raped by a woman in college. Writing a story about it caused me a profound amount of blowback.
I'm not really involved in the true literary community anymore. I love to read, I love my small book club. I have no respect for the American literary community at its "high" levels, as it has become almost incestuously insular in its worldview and personnel.
Comment by silent_h at 22/02/2025 at 01:51 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The Sorrows of Young Werther is a classic
Comment by Mindless-Stuff2771k at 23/02/2025 at 14:14 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The publishing world tried "sad boy lit" a while ago. It was given the genre title of "ladlit" and authors like Nicholas Hornsby of High fidelity and About a boy fame wrote some good books.
Mathew Norman has a number of really good stories. We are all Damaged is a wonderful story about a guy going through the aftermath of a break up and he acts badly to get through and grow. Not on purpose but because that's where his emotions him until he has healed enough to see himself.
Right now publishers are not interested in new Ladlit authors. It has been my experience that if you want "male centric emotional fiction" you have to look to the self publishing world. And in particular romance novels for men. There is a whole subreddit r/romance_for_men where this stuff can be found.
Like most romance literature it's a mixed bag. They may be cringy to the general public. (Romance usually is) And the covers by and large are probably cringy, but at its core the stories are addressing male emotional needs. (And like all authors some do it better than others).
But the literature and writing *is out there,* and people are reading it, though it may not look like what you expect from literature (litrpg perhaps). Ita simply that the big 5 publishers are just not interested in it.
Comment by NonesuchAndSuch77 at 21/02/2025 at 23:06 UTC
13 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Not sure there's space for it, at least not for cis hetero stories. I'm thinking about the article shared to this sub the other week, with the interviews with various young guys, and how a lot of them had stuff to say that wouldn't garner much sympathy or empathy (even discounting the openly Trump supporting ones). Nobody on the BookTok circuit would want a book about their lives, their pain, exactly how much it *sucks* to be a young dude in an era of rapidly changing expectations (more so than usual in recent years - it's always been kinda crap).
Comment by BoskoMaldoror at 21/02/2025 at 23:46 UTC
14 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Publishers don't want to publish literature from male writers, especially white male writers. As a result of that and also the fact that the humanties are stacked with upper middle-class MFAs and MAs, boys don't see literature that's for them or that reflects their experiences.
Comment by TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK at 21/02/2025 at 19:53 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Cameron raises a compelling question. This also shows why coming-of-age novels written by and about young men have only become more necessary throughout the years. As for the question of whether there’s space for them, Maloku insists there is. “If there is an appetite for these books, then the publishing industry will seek them out and publish them,” she says. “The real question is, **are men being more vulnerable than they used to be, or are we just more interested in these stories now because readers are bored of the same stories written by the same kinds of people?”**
I think it's both, and neither.
this article talks at length about *The Topeka School*: if it "makes anything evident, it’s the close relationship between radicalization, masculinity, and political rhetoric". It contrasts two types of Guy, Adam and Darren, who are radicalized in opposite ways; to learn more about Adam's empathy is to understand better Darren's lurch toward the right. And to really dig there, lit *has* to make you see the *whys* and the *hows* of a Darren character, someone we are correctly *terrified of* and would love nothing more to **other** as a shitbag.
but reading hopefully begets understanding, and god knows that writing about a Darren isn't one of the *same stories written by the same kinds of people*.
Comment by SoftwareAny4990 at 21/02/2025 at 20:25 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Idk.
I feel like they just gravitate to different types of literature. Maybe Anime/Manga.
Comment by librarianC at 21/02/2025 at 23:27 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This author, Kate Tobin, doesn't have a full profile on Esquire's webpage, so I am unsure about her whole body of work.
But to completely ignore Jason Reynolds, Jay Asher, Sherman Alexi, Gordon Korman - even fantasy authors like Rick Riordan, Orson Scott Card or Scott Westerfield - not to mention the heaps and heaps of graphic novelists from Brian Michael Bendis to Gene Luen Yang - it is silly. I already have a pretty big list here and I didn't even need to mention the proverbial elephant in the room - John Green.
There is lots of sad boys literature. The way that this is a whitewashed perspective, even though it explicitly addresses race, is just awful.
Talk to a teen serving librarian about sad boys literature, you will walk away with a stack of reads.
Comment by Big_scoot at 22/02/2025 at 01:48 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Don DeLillo comes to mind as a dark, moody male voice. White Noise is one of my favorites!
Comment by BurntToost at 22/02/2025 at 05:28 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The Burn Journals, No Longer Human, are two
Comment by powerlesshero111 at 21/02/2025 at 22:03 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Kind_of_a_Funny_Story
It's here. Sadly, the author did eventually commit suicide.
Comment by gatsome at 22/02/2025 at 00:21 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Plenty of sad boy strewn through fantasy and sci fi. I cried at a male sentient spider’s noble sacrifice for scientific progress just last year.
Comment by Linusthewise at 22/02/2025 at 01:56 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Perks of Being a Wallflower and Flowers for Algernon will get some sad male feelings.
Comment by IStillLoveHer37 at 25/02/2025 at 00:08 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is not a deep conversation starter the way most of the comments on this post are, but I really want to write romantic fiction. I don’t know that it would be particularly good, but I do think that it would probably provide an outlet to get out a lot of my romantic feelings that I otherwise bottle up and let metastasize when I’m single
Comment by SardonicusR at 21/02/2025 at 22:15 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It's more of a YA book, but Bless the Beasts and the Children (1970) is definitely in that category. Expect a lot of feelings.
Comment by dangelo7654398 at 21/02/2025 at 23:28 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Elric of Melnibone. Sad boy with a cool cursed sword.