The Book About a Girl Who’d Rather Write Fanfic Than Live

A girl, her twin, and a fictional boy wizard named Simon Snow

Cath and Wren are identical twins who used to be a package deal, right down to co-writing wildly popular fanfiction for a Harry Potter-shaped series called Simon Snow. Then they get to college and Wren decides she wants a roommate who isn’t her sister, thanks, and Cath is left alone in a dorm room with a stranger, a dad back home who might be having another manic episode, and forty thousand words left to finish on her Simon Snow fic before some invisible internet deadline that only matters to her.

That’s basically it. That’s the plot. Cath goes to class, avoids the dining hall because eating in front of strangers is its own horror genre, fights with her sister, falls into something with her roommate’s maybe-boyfriend Levi (a genuinely lovely, un-broody love interest, which still feels rare), and keeps disappearing into her laptop to write about a boy wizard falling in love with his vampire roommate. Rowell interspersed actual excerpts of Cath’s fanfic and of the “real” Simon Snow books between chapters, which sounds like a gimmick and mostly isn’t, it’s doing real work showing you what Cath is running toward every time real life gets to be too much.

Why this one stuck to my ribs (and where it sags)

Here’s the thing about “Fangirl”: it’s not really about romance, even though the Levi stuff is genuinely sweet and I will die on the hill that the “gay pirates” scene between Cath and her writing partner Nick is one of the most quietly devastating betrayals in YA-adjacent fiction, because it’s not a breakup, it’s a creative theft, and Rowell understood that for someone like Cath, having your art stolen hurts worse than heartbreak. It’s really a book about anxiety wearing a normal person’s clothes. Cath has social anxiety so specific and so unglamorized, no cute quirky-girl trembling, just real paralysis, that I recognized my own freshman year in it in a way that embarrassed me a little.

I read most of this during a week I was supposed to be doing something more productive, curled up on a secondhand couch that smelled like someone else’s dog, and I remember actively resenting anything that pulled me away from it, my phone, dinner, a friend calling. That’s the highest compliment I can give a book about escapism: it made me want to escape into it.

Now the tangent. I want to talk about Wren for a second because I think she gets flattened into “the mean sister” in a lot of casual takes on this book, and that’s not fair. Wren isn’t cruel, she’s suffocating under the exact same family situation Cath is, their dad’s mental illness, their mom leaving, and she copes by running toward normalcy (parties, a boyfriend, drinking too much) while Cath copes by running backward into fiction. They’re both coping badly. Rowell doesn’t punish either of them for it, and that felt more mature than most twin-conflict plots bother to be.

Where it doesn’t fully work: the back half sags. Once Cath and Levi’s will-they-won’t-they settles into a groove, there’s a stretch where the book is just Cath being anxious at various locations, and a subplot with her dad’s mental health gets introduced with real weight and then resolved almost too gently for how seriously it was set up. I also think if you don’t personally have some nostalgic or lived-in relationship to fandom culture, the fanfic excerpts can start to feel like homework. I didn’t mind them. My friend who I lent this to did, and she’s not wrong that some chunks of the fictional Simon Snow text are doing more world-building for Rowell’s later “Carry On” spinoff than they’re doing character work for Cath in the moment.

Is it a little slight, plot-wise? Yeah. Am I sure that doesn’t matter? Also yeah, mostly, though I get why some readers want more to actually happen.

The whole book is really one long argument that the thing you love obsessively when you’re eighteen isn’t a phase to be embarrassed out of, it’s just where you’re keeping yourself safe until you’re ready to come out.

About Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell was a newspaper columnist in Omaha before she started writing novels, which honestly explains a lot about her prose, it’s clean, funny, and never precious even when the feelings get big. She writes about Nebraska and awkward people and first loves with a specificity that reads like she actually remembers being young and uncomfortable instead of romanticizing it from a distance. “Fangirl” made her a household name in YA and new adult circles, “Eleanor & Park” made people cry on public transit, and she later doubled back into the Simon Snow universe for real with the “Carry On” trilogy, which is either a delightful bonus or an odd bit of world-expanding depending on how attached you got to it existing only inside Cath’s laptop.

If Cath wrecked you a little, read these next

Fangirl on Amazon is worth grabbing in physical form, honestly, the fanfic interstitials feel better on paper than they do flipping around an e-reader.

• “Eleanor & Park” by Rainbow Rowell, same author, rawer heartbreak, shorter and meaner in the best way
• “Attachments” by Rainbow Rowell, for grown-up Rowell voice with the same warmth, minus the campus setting
• “Geekerella” by Ashley Poston, if you want the fandom-obsessive energy with a lighter, more romance-forward plot
• “Carry On” by Rainbow Rowell, if you finished Fangirl desperate to actually read the Simon Snow books instead of just excerpts

For your book club

1. Is Cath’s anxiety portrayed as something to be “fixed,” or does the book let her stay who she is while still growing?
2. What did you make of Wren? Did your sympathy for her shift over the course of the book?
3. Do you think Cath and Levi’s relationship works because of Levi’s patience, or does it ask a lot of him without giving much back for a while?
4. What does the book seem to be saying about fanfiction and originality, especially through the Nick subplot?
5. Did the Simon Snow excerpts add to your experience of Cath’s story, or did you find yourself skimming them?