- Gen Z women have reclaimed book clubs.
- Data from Bookclubs, a club-organizing platform, shows young women flocking to build their own clubs.
- But behind the trend is something else: A deep-seated longing for human connection.
In the past few months alone, Gen Z women have reimagined the most unlikely things in their image.
The alternative metal band Korn has been declared “girly pop.” F1, historically a male-dominated sport, is officially an adrenaline-pumping hobby for the girls. Now, book clubs are getting the hot-girl treatment.
All the “It Girl” celebrities have their own book clubs, from model Kaia Gerber to Kendall Jenner. TikTok is flooded with “book recommendations for hot girls,” and young women are flocking to apps like Bookclubs to start or join a reading group.
But in an age when people are lonelier — and more chronically online — than ever, book clubs have taken on new meaning. It’s deeper than the optics of a TikTok slideshow or an aesthetic grid post. They’re a salve for social isolation, successfully rebranded as an activity for, and by, the girls.
Business Insider spoke with four Gen Z women from around the country, each of whom said they’d joined a book club after the pandemic in an attempt to make friends or strengthen relationships.
“During Covid, and even post-Covid, people are really craving meaningful connections,” said Anna Ford, the founder and CEO of the club-organizing platform Bookclubs, adding that reading groups are “surging” among young people.
“Books have long been kind of a central conduit for that,” Ford said.
A salve for loneliness
Making and maintaining friendships as an adult has always been challenging, even before factoring in several years of mandatory social isolation. Without the structure of college classes, young, working people can feel siloed after graduation.
For Isa Tomlinson, 26, that feeling came to a head in 2021 after moving back home to Austin after college. Having grown up in the city, she had plenty of friends. But with a hectic schedule as a night-shift nurse, she said she felt like she was constantly missing out on those connections.
Enter: The Twilight Fan Club.
Cheekily named after Tomlinson and her friends’ shared love for the teen drama series, the Twilight Fan Club quickly became one of her core experiences.
What started with just a few friends quickly spread to coworkers and mutuals until the group grew to more than 20 people, Tomlinson said.
“It was just a cool way to get a lot of people that might not have been in the same room or been friends initially to get on the same page and have a common place to meet up,” Tomlinson said.
Of course, with 20-plus people in a group, it can be hard to have any sort of book-focused group discussion. Amylynne Siroin, one of Tomlinson’s longtime friends and a Twilight Fan Club member, told BI that some people don’t even read the book. But the club is less about the books and more about the connections, she said.
“They come because it’s a girl gang, and we love to hang out and spend time together and drink wine,” she said. “It’s kind of like a reason to hang out — with a side of book discussion.”
Book clubs on the rise
Book clubs are nothing new. Celebrities like Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey might have made them more mainstream, but ardent readers have been congregating to talk about their favorite novels for centuries. “Reading circles,” some of the first iterations of book clubs, became popular in the late 1700s.
What is new is the environment in which the book clubs are being created. Americans are lonelier than ever, to the point where the US Surgeon General has declared loneliness an epidemic. People are searching for connection — Gen Zers have invested in gym memberships and social clubs, and post-retirement boomers are building their own communities.
For Gen Z women, book clubs are just the latest iteration of that search.
According to Ford, young women, in particular, have been flocking to the Bookclubs app since the pandemic.
Ford said that when the platform opened to the public in 2019, only 15% of users were under 34. That number has since jumped to 25%.
“Book clubs are surging in young people — young women,” Ford said, adding that 90% of Bookclubs’ users are women. “We have seen rapid growth in the past couple of years and a shift in the age and demographics of who’s using the platform.”
Bookclubs’ data show that younger people really are working hard to make friends. In the company’s 2023 survey, 50% of users between 18 and 34 said they had joined a reading group to make new friends. In older members, Ford said, that number is just 30%.
“It’s just such a good way to connect with people,” said 25-year-old Micaela Primoff. “Especially post-grad, I feel like it’s just been such a good hobby for me to fall into these stories after work and to have something deeper to talk about with friends.”
Primoff, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, started her reading group last spring as a way to deepen her relationships with her girlfriends. So far, she said, it’s been working.
The same is true for Vivien Shao, a 25-year-old living in New York. Things are slightly different at Shao’s book club, though — instead of choosing a book for the group, she and her “club” bring their own books to a café or restaurant and read in each other’s company.
“We call it book club, but we’re not actually doing a traditional book club,” Shao said.
Each club differs in its intensity, group size, and rules. But each girl’s club was invariably made to strengthen her relationships with friends — a testament to forging friendships in an increasingly lonely world.
“Discussing a piece of literature,” Ford said, “whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, is just a great way to get to know someone better and form personal connections and bonds.”
