Reconfiguring the Sick Girl in Young Adult Literature: Worlds Where We Might Belong

The YA novels under review in this essay focus on characters pathologized or socially constructed as “sick” or genderqueer. The importance of these texts in the constantly evolving landscape of YA literature is that they help to challenge assumptions about who is entitled to and deserving of a fully fleshed-out subjectivity. The protagonists in these texts grapple with the question of their survival in worlds generally poorly equipped to protect or help them, and, with one exception, they survive. In Amber Smith’s The Way I Used to Be, Eden is raped by her older brother’s best friend in her home during freshman year; Jeff Garvin’s Riley Cavanaugh struggles to embody their gender-fluid identity under the microscope of their father’s political career in Symptoms of Being Human; Marisa Reichardt breathes life into Morgan Grant, a survivor of a school shooting whose trauma confines her to the safety of her apartment in Underwater; Kerry Kletter’s Cassie O’Malley is newly independent after spending years at a psychiatric institution at the behest of her mother in The First Time She Drowned; and finally, in Lara Avery’s The Memory Book, Sammie McCoy fights a terminal diagnosis. Moreover, the protagonists of these novels are the facilitators of their own radical survival—however temporary—empowering themselves to heal wounds wrought by trauma through embodied action and process.

The “Sick Girl” in Literature

In 1998, I wrote in a journal every day: banal accounts of schoolyard marriages and daily skirmishes with antagonistic girls who bid me “go back to where you came from”; ruminations on the broader strokes of becoming a Canadian citizen, made important by a congratulatory card from my favourite teacher; and secondhand stories about people and places belonging to a different landscape that had by that time mostly receded from my memory. I also wrote about other things, details I was only just beginning to find words to articulate—the way my father had to relearn to smile after sending my grandparents back overseas, how the competing pressures of family and friends made me dream of fading away. Stress fractures were forming in the too-tight window of my childhood innocence and in the American dream narrative it engendered, so I retreated into distant worlds—the diaries of Anne Frank, Harlequin romances my mother hid at the back of a closet in the basement, encyclopaedias—praying that each upcoming page would sketch a world I recognized and into which I could project myself.

I would not gain access to worlds like my own—filled with trauma, chronic illness, dislocation—until much later, and I would not recognize this lack as one of representation until later still. Scholar-artist Johann Hedva, in her project Sick Woman Theory, names this pain created through lack, “the trauma of not being seen,” which becomes a characteristic central to her “sick woman,” in turn an extension of Instagram artist Audrey Wollen’s “sad girl, when, if, she grows up.”¹ Wollen developed Sad Girl Theory as a way of rethinking and re-historicizing the sadness of girls as a site of resistance and a response to repressive patriarchy. She says, “Basically, girls being sad has been categorized as this act of passivity, and therefore, discounted from the history of activism” (qtd. in Tunnicliffe). Hedva’s sick woman figure arises out of a desire to render visible those of us who possess “traditionally anti-heroic qualities—namely illness, idleness, and inaction” and to present them as “capable of being the symbol of a grand Theory.” The project of simply placing at the centre (and before that...