[1] Wollen's prose and essays gained traction on social media platforms like Tumblr as she developed the idea of "Sad Girl Theory".
[8] In 2018, Wollen and Leslie Dick organized a window installation of books, according to her biographer Jason McBride, that influenced writer and poet Kathy Acker.
Books include ones she reproduced, rewrote, appropriated, and "pirated" into her own texts from her various apartments in New York, London, and San Francisco.
Sad Girl Theory can be considered an academic response to the liberal and neoliberal feminist ideal that views women as the makers of their own success.
Hedva claims, in response to Wollen's work, that they were "mainly concerned with the question of what happens to the sad girl who is poor, queer, and/or not white when, if, she grows up.