I keep returning to this line by poet Ocean Vuong: “To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.” This ingenious paradox — bargaining over your own visibility — glitters throughout Demree McGhee’s debut short story collection, “Sympathy for Wild Girls.”
Published in 2025, the collection traces fragmented narratives depicting young, queer Black women who crave intimacy and belonging while confronting the dangers of being seen and wanted. McGhee centers themes of class consciousness, female friendship, grief, desire and love, mobilizing a Black feminist lens to explore desire as a form of danger. Some stories inhabit realist settings, while others venture into strange, surrealist territories that remind me of writers like Carmen Maria Machado and K-Ming Chang.
The characters in McGhee’s collection are hyperconscious of their bodies and uncomfortable in their own skin. After all, isn’t every story about girlhood and queerness also a story about the body?
In the first and titular tale of the collection, McGhee offers insight into the mind of a teenage girl who is afraid to be seen, who “thinks of every pair of eyes that could have possibly raked across her body.” In one of her increasingly extreme attempts to make herself undesirable to the human eye, she eventually runs away from home to seek shelter with a pack of coyotes.
When the protagonist is confronted with the decision to stay home or run away, she must choose between two forms of violence. This dilemma reminded me of the man-versus-bear debate that circulated online earlier this year. There exists the explicit violence of the coyotes scraping the protagonist’s body open with their fangs and claws, but there’s also the implicit, ongoing violence of an often predatory, lingering gaze on her body. In the end, our protagonist runs away with the coyotes, choosing death at the hands of the wilderness.
“Sympathy for Wild Girls” reminds me again that the spectrum of visibility, from invisibility to hypervisibility, is a slippery slope for Black women. If invisibility renders one voiceless and unseen, then hypervisibility takes the form of exaggerated seeing — objectifying and overexposing the body.
I often think about the visibility and representation that women of color are granted in films, books and mainstream media. “Sympathy for Wild Girls” reminds me again that the spectrum of visibility, from invisibility to hypervisibility, is a slippery slope for Black women. If invisibility renders one voiceless and unseen, then hypervisibility takes the form of exaggerated seeing — objectifying and overexposing the body. For many women of color, hypervisibility often manifests in sexualization and fetishization. As Vuong implies in his quote about beauty, being seen carries the risk of being misunderstood and turned into a spectacle. To McGhee, simply being seen is not enough.
Some of the characters in the collection desperately want to be seen and acknowledged; others want to hide away from the world and avoid being seen entirely; most wander about this in-between space. As one character says, “I was invisible when I wanted to be seen and a light post when I wanted to go unnoticed.”
The collection is undeniably concerned with girlhood, queerness and visibility, but it is also equally attentive to the material realities of who gets to survive. Class is politically and culturally uncomfortable and often overlooked in contemporary literature because, unlike other markers of identity — race and gender, for example — it appears more fluid. Often, it isn’t something you can decipher at a glance (unless they’re decked out in designer from head to toe).
McGhee’s girls are vulnerable not only because of their race or queerness, but also because of the material conditions and economic realities that push them to live precariously in the margins.
“Throwing Up in a Gated Community” explores the friendship between a young Black protagonist and her white best friend. What struck me most about this story wasn’t the girls’ quietly queer intimacy they couldn’t quite come to terms with, or even the white friend’s strange fixation on purity. It was the way McGhee captured their stark socioeconomic differences through smell. When her friend comes over to hang out at her unglamorous, low-income apartment complex, she’s visibly repulsed by the smells of garbage trucks, dumpsters and boys who reek of kitchen grease. Smell becomes a marker of class, distinguishing those privileged enough to distance themselves from waste and labor.
As the narrator becomes increasingly aware of her feelings for her best friend, that class difference manifests as internalized shame: “Sometimes I worried that she would sniff me out and one day she would hold her breath and turn away from me.” Even before the girls can articulate the differences between them, their bodies register these signs.
McGhee’s critiques of class are powerful in part because the publishing industry itself has a significant class problem. Many of today’s most accomplished and successful writing talents come from highly educated, privileged backgrounds. It makes sense that those with wealthy parents and a financial safety net would have greater access to resources like private schooling and an expensive MFA, and would be more likely to pursue the career and succeed as writers. And while anyone can write a great story about class, the collection raises valid critiques of whose voices are heard and how class is represented.
“Sympathy for Wild Girls” refuses the assumption that visibility is inherently liberating. Visibility of all kinds can be painful. It can be dehumanizing, confusing, fraught, lonely, disorienting and absurd. Yet, how can we survive if we aren’t seen at all? These stories remind us that the central question is not simply whether people are seen, but how they are seen, by whom and at what cost. As McGhee says, “society’s violence against us is hell, but we deserve great fiction.”
Corina Yi PO ’28 likes writing poetry and playing the piano. She misses her dog in Korea a lot.
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