Haven’t you heard? It’s a brat summer. Charli XCX’s latest album is the template for hot-weather antics. Big feelings, slutty outfits, and partying are all on the menu. But you’re not excluded from having a brat summer if you’re more of an indoor kid than a club kid. Countless brat-summer book lists have popped up on social media, giving recs for hot-girl books to read at a bar with a martini and a side of fries.
These lists are good, but has anyone done the work to go track by track and pick a book for each song on the album? Of course not; that would be insane. Overly indulgent. Bratty, even. So without further ado:
“360”
Down the Drain, by Julia Fox
This book narrates how actress–model–”It” girl Julia Fox became everywhere, so Julia. Down the Drain depicts Fox’s tumultuous childhood, teen years, and adulthood. Look, there’s a lot of tumult. When Kanye West is like only the fifth-most aggro and chaotic man in your life, that’s a memoir. It’s a book about a person who refuses to live anything less than an iconic life, despite all the problems that causes.
“Club classics”
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
I want to read Emily, I want to read Anne, I want to read with George (Eliot). But seriously, folks, Jane Eyre is the cuntiest of the (club) classic lit canon. As a narrator, Jane is somehow clear-headed and self-deluded at the same time, the perfect brat POV. It is a hoot and a half to sit in a bar surrounded by vapid rich people and dive into a book in which the rich are just as vapid, petty, and, dare we say? Horny.
“Sympathy is a knife”
Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
And then we have this book to rip off the veneer of Jane Eyre’s “happily ever after,” the same way “Sympathy is a knife” undercuts brat’s hyphy posturing with self-doubt and jealousy. “Sympathy is a knife” pops the “all us pop girls are like a family” bubble that consumer-friendly white feminism demands. Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Jane Eyre’s Bertha before she became the prototypical madwoman in the attic. It’s a postcolonial takedown of Jane “becoming a missionary in India will fix all my problems” Eyre.
“I might say something stupid”
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
I promise I didn’t pick this book just because the cover is brat green. That’s only part of it. “I might say something stupid” is a song about feeling out of place at a party, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower is like 70 percent feeling out of place at parties. (The other 30 percent is feeling out of place at school and a third spoilery thing.) It’s also about finding a sense of belonging with your fellow freaks, which is what Charli’s angels feel within the fandom.
“Talk talk”
N.P., by Banana Yoshimoto
N.P. is a book about translation, but also about a translated book called N.P. Most of all, it’s about the failures of language to capture reality, to bridge the gap between people and those they love. Everyone in the book is transfixed by language while crushing on one another; they find that no language (written, spoken, English, Japanese) is up to the task of conveying the depth of their feeling. No amount of speech will bring the characters as close together as they want. Charli sings “I wish you’d talk talk to me,” but what this book presupposes is maybe that’s never enough.
“Von dutch”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
From the No. 1 bitch of New Journalism, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Didion’s ode to California. In much the same way, Charli’s song (and the remix with Addison Rae) offers quintessential Los Angeles, with the titular Cali-based brand, references to shopping on Melrose, and the single’s cover art featuring the Chateau Marmont’s signature mismatched furniture. If you recognized the Chateau Marmont’s furniture, this book is for you.
“Everything is romantic”
Edgewise: a Picture of Cookie Mueller, by Chloe Griffin
Cookie Mueller lived her life in a singular way that was an extension of her crazy appetite for experience. Cookie grew up in Baltimore, joined John Waters’s film collective in the ’70s, had a child in Provincetown, then became a literary luminary of ’80s New York. Her writing romanticized everything, even meeting the Manson girls. This oral history of her life, which Waters contributed to, creates a snapshot of a woman who could find the divine in trash. It also talks a lot about falling in love (again and again) in Italy.
“Rewind”
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells
You’d think this book about mother-daughter trauma would be for “Apple,” wouldn’t you? But Divine Secrets speaks so gorgeously about unself-conscious girlhood and the desire for all women to rewind to that time before they ordered their lives for the male gaze. In “Rewind,” Charli laments what she’s lost by growing past that time when she was less concerned with her appearance and her position in the pop world. The same wounds wind through generations in this book. Well, with less concern for pop superstardom.
“So I”
Grief Is for People, by Sloane Crosley
Like Charli’s tribute to hyperpop inventrix Sophie, Grief Is for People is a memoir about a person’s love for a friend, collaborator, and mentor. Someone who challenged them, intimidated them, and comforted them in equal measure. What’s more, it’s about how every death feels bigger yet smaller after COVID and the cruelties of the 21st century.
“Girl, so confusing”
Adult Drama, by Natalie Beach
What better way to commemorate female frenemyship than this book of essays by Caroline Calloway’s one-time ghostwriter? As YouTube essayist D’Angelo Wallace pointed out, Beach’s book is so much more than the drama that launched her to notoriety. The book touches on topics like political activism, body image, and class.
(Side note: this rec is for the original version of “Girl, so confusing.” The appropriate book for the Lorde remix is Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, by Marion Meade. A biography of four women writers during the Roaring ’20s, it highlights how every “It” girl has struggles of her own, much like Lorde’s verse.)
“Apple”
Many options, by everybody
There are too many books about generational trauma! Too many stories, too many rotten apples. That’s probably why “Apple” has countless fanvids on TikTok soundtracking every story imaginable. Succession, The Bear, Ladybird … everybody gets an apple! Even Gilmore Girls. Especially Gilmore Girls. So it’s really more a personal choice which book best documents the love and hate and attempts to individuate that occur within a family. You could go for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, if you’re in an epistolary mood. Or The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, to honor Charli’s Indian roots. Or the one-two punch of Unsinkable, by Debbie Reynolds, and Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher, if you want a mom’s POV in there as well. The possibilities are endless.
“B2b”
Sex and Rage, by Eve Babitz
Truly, an Eve Babitz book could work for almost every song on brat. The California hedonism of “Von dutch” brings Slow Days Fast Company to mind. The new co-biography about Babitz and Didion is perfect “Girl, so confusing” material. But Sex and Rage is pure “B2b,” with its endless samey days and an ex who keeps coming back like a turd that won’t flush. Here, Babitz fictionalizes two toxic exes, Earl McGrath and Ahmet Ertegun, that she can’t seem to evade. If you want good evidence for why exes shouldn’t try to stay friends, read Sex and Rage.
“Mean girls”
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh
You know we had to do it to them. “Mean girls” is a song about a New York girl who’s kind of annoying but also freakishly adept at getting attention. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is basically the titular mean girl in book form — a novel that’s had a certain corner of the culture in a chokehold for six years now. She’s everywhere, she’s kind of annoying about it, and she’s a lot darker than her ubiquity would hint at.
“I think about it all the time”
Motherhood, by Sheila Heti
In Motherhood, Sheila Heti designs her own version of the I Ching to try and figure out whether being a mother or being an artist is the better way to honor her ancestors. She vacillates between these competing ideas (that maybe don’t need to compete at all) in the exact same way Charli’s song does. It’s eerily similar vibes.
“365”
The Last Party, by Anthony Haden-Guest
What better pairing for Charli’s song about doing coke in the bathroom than a firsthand account of the rise and fall of Studio 54? Haden-Guest makes Studio 54 sound like both the best and worst party in the world. More important, it was a party no one was really capable of stopping. You think the feds can stop a good time? Think again. The story starts before Studio 54’s founding and ends only with Steve Rubell’s death.
“Hello goodbye”
The Moustache, by Emmanuel Carrère
“Hello goodbye” is a song about a person so destabilized by a preemptive breakup they feel out of their mind and “a nervous wreck.” The Moustache is about a guy who loses his mind when his wife refuses to acknowledge that he used to have a mustache. It’s the little things, you know?
“Guess”
Sluts, edited by Michelle Tea
Charli saved her sluttiest slut anthem for the deluxe edition. It’s a song about the dance of flirting, of dirty talk, of fun lingerie, of tramp stamps. Sluts brings this same joie de vivre to the very concept of sluttiness. Are you born a slut or are you made one? Does it suck to be a slut, or does it in fact rock? These are the questions that are left overanswered by the debut collection from Dopamine Press.
“Spring Breakers”
My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
“Why are the pretty ones always insane?” It’s a question Chief Wiggum asks in a Bad Era episode of The Simpsons, but it’s also a question that runs through “Spring breakers” and My Sister the Serial Killer. Or, rather, those pieces of art explore what makes the insane so hot. My Sister the Serial Killer is way funnier than you’d assume from the title and premise (a nurse covers up for her sister’s black-widow tendencies until her crush becomes the next potential victim). There’s glamour — and humor — in casual cruelty.
