But the Girl

A novel about belonging, alienation, and the exquisite pleasure and pain of girlhood, But the Girl is a wry and razor-sharp coming-of-age novel for readers of The Idiot by Elif Batuman and Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.

‘I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals – that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me.’

Girl is spending the spring at an artist’s residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can’t stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a ‘postcolonial novel’? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you?