Literary Mean Girls, Book Cliques, and…Parenting?

When the first Gossip Girl book came out in April 2002, I was graduating college. I don’t remember when or why I picked it up, but I remember flying through the book and finding it oddly appealing, sort of like candy that you know will make you sick but it’s so good, you keep eating it. And I proceeded to read each book as it came out. I won’t lie — when Gossip Girl: The Carlyles came out in 2008, I read that, too. The Clique series was first published in 2004, and that never really gained traction for me, but from what I’ve skimmed, it’s much of the same, but set in middle school.

There are also more recent books like Tiny Pretty Things, which isn’t set at a day school, but instead at a ballet school with plenty of mean girl drama, and Ace of Spades, which is still set at a private school but turns the usual blonde-white-girl mean girl world on its head and includes actually addressing issues like racism and classism.

What happens when mean girls grow up?

The thing is, this doesn’t stop at middle school or high school. The mean girl trope and cliques show up in adult fiction, too. Mommy fiction (for lack of a better term for the dishy novels about motherhood) is full of these women: the moms with the thousand-dollar Bugaboo strollers, with the designer diaper bags, the kids in immaculate outfits and packed schedules of child development classes, with nary a spit-up stain to be seen. We read about the mommy cliques and the misfits. We read about the Peloton-obsessed/Soul Cycle devotees and the moms showing up at elementary and middle school functions in their athleisure, their social media backstabbing, and their once-overs at anyone who doesn’t pass muster. Books like Yoga Pant Nation, Happy and You Know It, and even older ones like Momzillas, all have these elements.

Wednesday Martin brought this all to life in her memoir Primates of Park Avenue — what was previously thought of as embellishment in “chick lit” was…somewhat true?

I read many of these kinds of novels prior to becoming a mother, with a mix of amusement and horror, and read Primates when I was pregnant. As much as I love a good gossipy novel, imagine my surprise when my son went to preschool and I realized that these books aren’t necessarily all that far off in some cases. Even in the suburbs, where I live (and I am, most assuredly, not in the same economic stratosphere as Martin), there are things like the subtle up-down outfit evaluations, the “messy casual chic” sweats that cost upwards of $400 and are supposed to show you’re not trying too hard (except for the logos on your hoodie and pants that say otherwise), and the competitive parenting that shows up in humble-brags in conversation or outright comparisons during pickups. I kid you not, I had one mom ask me during preschool pickup how many extracurriculars my son was in. He was 3 at the time.

Needless to say, that’s not quite my scene. I did the clique thing in college with my sorority. I didn’t expect suburban preschool to be Primates of Park Ave-lite, except with minivans. And yet I found myself doing exactly what Martin did: observing and analyzing. The “uniforms” of both moms and kids (somehow, dads always get a pass with this stuff; WHY?). The manners of speech and coded language. The sizing up. When thinking of Martin’s book and what she did, and how I was doing the same thing, it allowed me to laugh inside, even as I dealt with parents who brushed off inclusion and mean kids and their moms. Mentally composing McSweeney’s posts about class text threads and parental behavior got me through quarantine in 2020.