The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend
by Mieri Hiranishi
2023
The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print.
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print.
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.
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