The Atlantic

Rewriting the ‘Boy Genius’

Caitlin Horrocks’s debut novel builds on a rich tradition of women writers who complicate the myth of male virtuosity until it crumbles.
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Last year, the indie rock singers Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus formed a supergroup called boygenius. In a Billboard interview, Dacus traced the name to the combined frustration and envy the three women felt toward “hyper-confident” male performers too convinced of their own talent to take criticism or share the stage. While recording, she said, “we’d just tell each other, ‘Every thought is worth saying. Just be the boy genius. Act with confidence.’ That was helpful, even if it is based off of a toxic characterization.”

Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus are not the only artists to simultaneously criticize and channel the boy-genius trope. Contemporary fiction has a rich vein of women (1995), which explores the German Romantic poet Novalis’s youth with acid wit. In that book, as well as Meg Wolitzer’s (2003) and Erin Somers’s(2019), male swagger quickly reveals itself to be a trap: The more airtight an artist’s confidence, the more it seems to stunt his emotional growth.

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