Hot Girl Books (a non-exhaustive list)
This might just be my favourite genre, and in this case Hot Girl is a state of mind, anyone can be a Hot Girl
I met with my book club this week (not sure if three people, only two of which actually read the book, constitute a club, but our numbers are dwindling as deadline season approaches) and once more found myself referring to the concept of a “Hot Girl Book.” Much like taking a Hot Girl Friday class at Soul Cycle, Hot Girl here is a state of mind, being “hot” or a “girl” are not prerequisites. These are the books where if I see a fellow Hot Girl reading in public, I immediately want to be her friend (and I also assume she’s watching Uncarley’s reading wrapped for book recommendations, had a brief hyperfixation on Caroline Calloway over the pandemic, has an emotional support pop girlie and is very good at winged eyeliner). The Hot Girl literary canon is very broad and encompasses a variety of genres. It’s not a specific theme or subject matter that defines it, but a general vibe “Hot Girl Books” are almost always written by women (who are oftentimes Hot Girls themselves), however should not be confused with the “Girlboss” genre that took over the world (or at least the internet) in 2014. Without further ado, here is my (non-exhaustive) list of the Hot Girl canon, in no particular order.
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados
Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.
In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and having fun in a world that wants you to do neither.
I’ve spoken about this book ad nauseam, but since it was my pick for this month’s book club it’s the freshest in my mind and therefore top of the list. A book by a party girl for the party girls, though knowing that Granados wrote this at 22 makes me extra self-conscious about my own writing. As someone going through a post-grad (quarter-life? I feel like I’m there already unless I live to see 100) crisis and feeling a bit lost, it’s comforting to read something that is young and fun and doesn’t shy away from that. Isa and Gala have a complex friendship that I think almost every girl can relate to, and they’re not too bothered about being “taken seriously,” whilst being clinically aware of the power they hold in their youth and femininity, with Isa pointing out that “You can’t buy charm, but you can certainly spend it, and if that’s true, you can certainly withhold it too.”
A quote if you’re not convinced:
Annabel caught my eye and waved me over to her. She introduced Gala and me to the critic “Isn’t it rare to find two people who like art without the intention of ever making it? I’m really wowed by people without artistic inclinations, aren’t you?” The critic peered over his glasses to take a good look at us. “How do you know they’re not just gathering material?”
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman by Nora Ephron
With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in "I Feel Bad About My Neck," a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.
The woman who brought us "When Harry Met Sally"..., "Sleepless in Seattle", "You've Got Mail", and "Bewitched," and the author of best sellers "Heartburn," "Scribble Scribble," and "Crazy Salad," discusses everything -from how much she hates her purse to how much time she spends attempting to stop the clock: the hair dye, the treadmill, the lotions and creams that promise to slow the aging process but never do. Oh, and she can't stand the way her neck looks. But her dermatologist tells her there's no quick fix for that.
Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent. She recounts her anything-but-glamorous days as a White House intern during the JFK years ("I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the President did not make a pass at") and shares how she fell in and out of love with Bill Clinton - from a distance, of course. But mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age.
Utterly courageous, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, "I Feel Bad About My Neck" is a book of wisdom, advice, and laugh-out-loud moments, a scrumptious, irresistible treat.
This might just be my Hot Girl bible. I’ve talked about this book with my mom, her friends, my friends, my therapist and strangers on the internet. It’s my go-to birthday gift. The phrase “everything is copy” has firmly entered my lexicon and is used to justify almost everything I do, or pull me out of a spiral when I realise I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I never thought I was a non-fiction girlie until I realised I was reading the wrong non-fiction. This is the right non-fiction.
A quote if you’re not convinced:
I can’t believe how real life never lets you down. I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.
Everything is copy
I am seven months pregnant with my second child, and I’ve just discovered that my second husband is in love with someone else. She too is married. Her husband telephones me. He’s the British ambassador to the United States. I’m not kidding. He happens to be the kind of person who tends to see almost everything in global terms. He suggests lunch. We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Conneticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”
“It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”
I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking someday this will be a funny story.
Sula by Toni Morrison
Sula and Nel are two young black girls: clever and poor. They grow up together sharing their secrets, dreams and happiness. Then Sula breaks free from their small-town community in the uplands of Ohio to roam the cities of America. When she returns ten years later much has changed. Including Nel, who now has a husband and three children. The friendship between the two women becomes strained and the whole town grows wary as Sula continues in her wayward, vagabond and uncompromising ways.
I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this book, so it reminds me of a Hot Girl Braniac moment. I was first introduced to Toni Morrison when I read Beloved in High School, but Sula was what really made me fall in love with her writing, and what I recommend to anyone starting their Toni Morrison love affair. I am someone who froths at the mouth for complex female friendships, and read this at a pretty pivotal time in my life where it resonated even more. If you’re a fan of My Brilliant Friend, you are going to love this.
And if you’re not yet convinced…
“We was girls together,” she said, as though explaining something
The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
Set in New York, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance meetings, and ever-changing relationships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman.
Running through the book is Vivian Gornick’s animated exchange of more than twenty years with her best friend Leonard, as well as interactions with grocers, doormen, people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful.
A narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, in this memoir we encounter Gornick’s rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.
Hot Girls love to read memoirs about other Hot Girls, and this is a fun and light one to add to your TBR list. Fans of Nora Ephron will be delighted by Gornick’s sharp and witty reflection on life, love and friendship. My copy is covered in margin notes and highlighter bleeding through the pages, with several exclamation points noting how someone managed to put into words feelings so familiar and yet so elusive.
In case you’re not convinced:
“Listen to us,” I say. “Two old women talking about lousy lovers.”
This time the man beside me laughs out loud. I turn and take a good long look at him.
“We’re sleeping with the same guys, right?” I say.
Yes, he nods. “And with the same ratio of satisfaction.”
For a split second the three of us look at one another, and then, all at once, we begin to howl. When the howling stops, we are all beaming. Together we have performed, and separately we have been recieved.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
On the surface, our narrator has everything you could want in life. She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance.
But there is a vacuum in her life and she's got the perfect solution. She's going to take a year under sedation to relax and hide away from the world.
What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve got to be honest, though I was expecting to love this book (I felt like everyone and their cool older sister is obsessed) but my reaction was a bit lukewarm. However this is not a list of my favourite books, but instead a non-exhaustive list of what I would consider to be the Hot Girl canon, so I will let other Hot Girls read and decide for themselves. (I have no quotes for this as I read it three years ago and did not make a single note). I am however very much here for the contemporary Hot Girls writing, as I am sick of falling in love with someone’s writing and then having to ration their works knowing there’s no more where this came from.
Just Kids by Patti Smith
In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, Scribner's Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol's Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years--the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup.
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.
Another insanely popular Hot Girl book, and one that I took ages to read and then wondered what took me so long. I will continue to contribute to the hype and have recommended this to so many people in my life that I should start sending out affiliate links (that would be putting it nicely, I’ve been forcefully shoving this book down my friends’ throats, but I do it with love). Reading about Patti’s relationship with Robert had me ugly-crying in public. Whilst I usually think “let’s not put a label on things” is a line almost always accompanied by a degree of sleaziness or emotional detachment, their relationship transcends traditional boundaries and yet feels like one of the rawest and most honest depictions of love I have encountered. Also, everyone (and I do mean everyone) was just… hanging around in the 70s, so it also sometimes feels like some epic crossover episode where all of these iconic characters are walking in and out of the Chelsea Hotel like it’s no big deal.
And if you’re not convinced (but like seriously…this is the best book I read in 2024)
I bought stacks of book, but I didn’t read them. I taped sheets of paper to the wall, but I didn’t draw. I slid my guitar under the bed. At night, alone, I just sat and waited. Once again I found myself contemplating what I should be doing to do something of worth. Eveything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later – the night before New Year’s Eve –the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of 40 years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LA airport, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Centre to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’s ‘attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself’. The result is an exploration of an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad.
No Hot Girl book list would be complete without Didion, idolised and aestheticised by the thought daughters and Lit Girls alike (and probably some other trendy category I’ve probably overlooked, but forgive me, I’m on Instagram reels, not TikTok, and am therefore always late to the party). You can honestly take your pick from any of her works (and the same goes for the next author featured on this list), but this is my most recent read.
My copy is covered in highlighter streaks, but this is one of my favourites:
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death.
Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz
No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow's script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn't matter if Babitz ever gets the guy--she seduces us.
I’ll preface this by saying that if Eve Babitz has 1000 fans, I’m one of them. If she has one fan, it’s me. If she has no fans, I’m dead. I had a hard time choosing just one of her works to include in this list. She is outrageous in the best way, funny, sharp, brutally honest and able to put into words some of the unintelligible mess going on in my head (or being brave enough to say the shit we’re all thinking). One of the original Hot Girls, I’m equally obsessed with her fiction and non-fiction (Sex and Rage was the line that got me hooked) but if I were to recommend somewhere to start, this would be it.
And because I can’t be raving on my own…
The very next night I was having dinner with a fashionable young rich man who looked at me as I smoothed over some paté over some toast and said, “You better watch out with that stuff. It’ll make you fat.”
“Well gee,” I said to him, “there are so many perfect women, it’s just horrible you have to spend time sitting here with me.”
Arrogance and conceit and remarks like that one are much more fun than starving all the time. Once it is established that you are you and everyone else is merely perfcet, ordinary factory-like perfect… you can wreak all the havok you want.
And if you made it to the end, congratulations on your impressive attention span, social media hasn’t completely fried your brain just yet! Hopefully this can help you add a couple of books to your TBR list or you’ve found someone new to gush about your favourites (hi, let’s be friends!). I eat up Hot Girl books and am always looking for more reading recommendations, so let me know if there are any more you think make the cut (and who knows, maybe I’ll come up with the continuation of the Hot Girl literary canon)