The Honest Teenage Girl Coming-of-Age Tales We Needed: ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Derry Girls’

Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut Lady Bird and Channel 4’s sitcom Derry Girls are equally charming, nostalgic and hilarious, but the similarities don’t end there. Lady Bird was released in the UK the same time the show was finishing its first season, both of them being recoding-breaking smash-hits. With an average of 2.5 million viewers in the UK, ‘Derry Girls’ became Channel 4's most successful new comedy since 2004. For a while, Lady Bird was the best reviewed film of all time on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s no coincidence then that these two very similar tales are critically and publicly adored, but the question to ask now is why?

Looking at them independently, much has been written on why these stories are so loved by so many. Shilpa Ganatra writes about ‘How Derry Girls became an instant sitcom classic’ in The Guardian, with her answer to the question being that “it’s the way it expertly tells the story of four bolshy, funny, confused, rude schoolgirls.” Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is also a character that can be described as a bolshy, funny, confused, rude schoolgirl, even if her story is a decade later than Derry Girls, and takes place on the other side of the Atlantic.

Both of them are set in the recent past, Lady Bird in the 00s and Derry Girls in the 90s, but there is a mixed sense of them being old and also fresh. For Lady Bird, a lot of work went into capturing Sacramento in the 00s, with Greta Gerwig even making playlists for and giving a collection of Joan Didion’s essays to Saoirse Ronan. Derry Girls too recreates a world, but this time it’s North-West Ireland in the 90s, which it does so, but not in a way that is overbearing. They both make you feel nostalgic for a time gone, but are also strikingly different and bold. The ways in which the both seem to do this is mainly with the characters, but also with the plot and dialogue.

What makes the characters fresh although the stories are set in the past is that they are confident in a way that we wish we were at that age. We can watch them, flawed as they are, be bold and reckless, in a way teenage girls haven't traditionally been portrayed. In the first minutes that we see Lady Bird, she jumps out of a moving car. Similarly, in the first moments that we meet Erin Quinn (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), she's telling her mum that “teenagers have rights now, you know” backing it up by saying Macaulay Culkin might be divorcing his parents.

Lady Bird’s relationship with her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) is at the heart of the movie. In the opening scene, their dynamic is set up with exchanges like when Lady Bird says “I wanna go where culture is, like New York or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods”, and Marion hits back with, “How in the world did I raise such a snob. You wouldn’t get into those school anyway.” Erin’s mother, Ma Mary (Tara Lynne O’Neill) similarly keeps her daughter in check. When Erin tells her she's “decided to put my own spin on the uniform this year”, Ma Mary replies “I’ll spin you across that floor. Get your blazer on.”

There is also the obvious presence of Catholic school in both of them. Gerwig wanted to make a film that reflected her experience of Catholic school, which was joyful and beautiful. Taking Catholic school seriously and not simply presenting us with a stereotype is exactly what Lady Bird does. Similarly, girls who go to Catholic school in Derry have said that the show looks and sounds real, and that there’s nothing fake about it. The show presents an authentic experience as it is partly based on the writer, Lisa McGee’s own experience of Catholic school, and Lady Bird does the same with Gerwig’s experience. Gerwig herself has said that the more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes, and that is what both Lady Bird and Derry Girls do, reflecting teenage female life from a first hand experience.

Sexuality is also something that each of them manage to portray well, which is probably because these are stories told by women who are relating experiences similar to their own. Lady Bird’s loss of virginity is not glamourised, with it being more awkward than sexualised and Kyle (Timothée Chalamet) having lied to her. Erin embarrassingly mistakes one of the the teenagers visiting Derry and affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster for a prostitute. These messy and embarrassing stories are recognisable as relatable as the teenage experience.

Awkward teenage encounters aren't all they’re honest about, as they both have gay characters that end up coming out to Lady Bird and Erin. In Derry Girls, Clare comes out to Erin after she wrote an anonymous letter to the school newspaper and finding the “wee lesbian” became the mystery of the school. Erin first denies it and Clare says “Do you mind, I’m trying to come out here”, to which Erin replies “Well, don’t. Don’t come out, Go back in.” Eventually Erin realises she just misses her friend, and everything is as it was, but better as Clare is now out.

With Lady Bird, the situation is more complicated, as Lady Bird walks in on her boyfriend Danny kissing another boy in the bathroom. Lady Bird is upset, she crosses his name off her wall and cries, but when she sees how afraid he is, she comforts him and promises not to out him. She gives him the basic right of coming out on his own terms instead of outing him as a messed up revenge scheme or blackmailing him. In fact she and Danny have this sweet moment, with Lady Bird offering him comfort for a short while. These kinds of positive interactions, small as they are, are where Lady Bird and Derry Girls stand out as different to and better than those that have come before.

Representation of teenage girls as they actually are is something that is very much still needed, in a world where the number of female led films dropped last year. The buzz around Derry Girls and Lady Bird is very much deserved because there is definitely a gap that they recognisably fill. Most of us didn’t grow up in Northern Ireland in the 90s, or Sacramento in the 00s, and yet these stories are successful because they are relatable and make us feel nostalgic.

However, there are still places to go from here, as Lady Bird and Derry Girls represent only the beginning. All teenage girls are not white, cis, straight and Catholic - in fact, the majority of teenage girl experiences are not being related in mainstream TV and film, proving that there are many stories that are yet to be told. It does feel amazing to have female-made and female-led TV and film out there, and we can only hope it continues to grow.