For Salon's "Saved by Pop Culture" series of personal essays, Salon editor Adele Melander-Dayton writes "How Ghost World Made Me Brave":
"[Enid] might be miserable, sometimes, but she's still capable of seeing the world on her own terms, marveling at the strangeness of what she sees. Still, most of Enid's responses to being young and in pain are not 'healthy.' She doesn't throw herself with manic dedication into stage-managing the high school production of South Pacific, volunteer for wilderness trail maintenance, take up knitting, or see a shrink, all things I tried during my senior year in efforts to distract myself. But Enid did teach me that it's OK to live with a little darkness. I didn't feel like being nice, or pretending that everything was cool, and neither did Enid."
As Lisa Simpson said, "I really identified with the girls in Ghost World. They made me feel like I wasn't so alone."