Wordstock's Mean Girls panel—featuring thriller writer Chelsea Cain, YA novelist Moira Young, and nonfiction writer Lisa Wells— was everything I want out of a Wordstock panel: smart, funny, insightful, and even the annoying audience questions were kinda entertaining. ("I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and it changed my life...). Here's a rough transcript of the first few minutes, which set the tone for the rest of the panel.


How is a mean girl different from a bad girl?

Chelsea Cain: Mean girls are mean to women as well as men. A bad girl is trouble, but she puts out. A mean girl doesn’t necessarily put out... Mean girls in the popular consciousness are worse than bad girls, because they're aggressive. A bad girl has by definition a story—something has happened to her, she’s this way for a reason. A mean girl is just mean for the sake of being mean.

Moira Wells: Mean girls are malicious, bullying, spiteful… someone who gets pleasure out of making someone’s life a misery. Where as a bad girl, I agree, is someone who’s troubled or acts out, but there’s a reason for it. Meanness goes to the bone.

Lisa Wells: It was interesting when I found out I was on this panel because my book’s non fiction. So I’m the mean girl. Some of the feedback I got from readers was, you know, way to go, you really exposed yourself by being honest about what a bitch you are, basically. I didn’t know I was a bitch until the book came out. I thought maybe I was a cultural critic… You guys are hitting on the pop culture definition of a mean girl—skinny, blonde, fangs through lip gloss—but in real life some of us have the experience of being a mean girl just for having a brain.

They went on to discuss if and how a "mean girl" can be redeemed; whether mean girls have to be hot (Cain: Yes. Hot girls are allowed to get away with more.); and the difficulties in writing and selling an unsympathetic female protagonist. Big thumbs up to whomever set this up: I wasn't sure how it was going to play out, particularly because Young and Cain are fiction authors and Wells writes very personal nonfiction, but Wells' perspective actually grounded all the talk of fictional mean girls quite well. And now I want to read Moira Young, whose Blood Red Road has been described as "better than the Hunger Games."