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WORK TITLE: Dead Girls
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://alicebolin.com/
CITY: Memphis
STATE: TN
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018056895
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Bolin, Alice
Found in: Bolin, Alice. Dead girls, 2018: eCIP title page (Alice
Bolin)
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Montana, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, essayist, poet, short-story writer, editor, educator, and scholar. University of Memphis, visiting assistant professor and creative nonfiction instructor.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize nomination.
WRITINGS
Okey-Panky (a web magazine), nonfiction editor.
SIDELIGHTS
Alice Bolin is a writer, scholar, essayist, and editor. She is visiting assistant professor and creative nonfiction instructor at the University of Memphis. She is a frequent writer of essays on literature, popular culture, music, and related topics. She is especially interested in topics that include “murder, country music, makeup, social media, poetry, and twentieth century women writers,” she stated on the Alice Bolin website. In addition to her nonfiction work, she also publishes poetry and short stories. Bolin holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Montana.
In her book Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture, Bolin “picks apart our cultural preoccupation with Dead Girl stories to examine the misogyny and racism that so often lie just underneath,” commented interviewer Dahlia Balcazar on the Bitch Media website. She wants to know why American readers and viewers are particularly obsessed with a subgenre that relies on the death of women and what that obsession says about the way women are seen in modern American culture.
In an interview with Booklist Reader contributor Courtney Eathorne, Bolin gave a description of what she means by a “dead girl” in the context of her book. “What I think of as a dead girl or a dead girl story is a mystery or noir that opens up with the discovery of the body of a dead young woman, usually a white woman, and the rest of the story is about solving her murder . . . The thing about the dead girl is that we, as an audience, almost never identify with or understand her. If we did, those stories would be too painful to explore,” Bolin stated.
Bolin further expanded on the idea of dead girl stories in the interview with Balcazar. “Dead Girl stories are ultimately about uncovering female darkness and revealing male innocence. Even when there’s a woman at the center—like Veronica Mars, say—it’s about uncovering the darkness within her. What happened to me? Why did I change? Why did I become dark?” For Bolin, these types of stories “focus on male innocence and vulnerability because they often reveal male wickedness, so it’s about flipping the script, essentially—we see the detectives in True Detective crying and confronting this evil that’s so much bigger than them,” she further told Balcazar.
Perhaps more relevant, Bolin finds that in these types of stories, “murdered or disappeared woman isn’t a fully formed being but rather a prop male characters can use to help them solve some internal or external conflict of their own,” commented Sadie Trombetta, writing in Bustle.
Much of Bolin’s analysis is spent “identifying tropes in some of the most popular pieces of media in the subgenre, teasing out what it is about these dead girls that may be keeping our eyes and psyches glued,” commented Vice contributor Rebecca Renner. Each of these tropes “has its own nuances, but the tropes that Bolin examines largely point to one implicit desire on the part of both writers and viewers: for women to embody ultimate submission. And the most interesting parts of the book are the (too infrequent) moments in which Bolin explicitly ties those tropes to social phenomena and statistics in real life—in which we can clearly see how these stories both reflect and perpetuate a dangerous relationship to women,” Renner stated.
“Smart, thorough, and urgent, Bolin’s essays are a force to be reckoned with,” remarked Courtney Eathorne, writing in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews writer called Dead Girls an “illuminating study on the role women play in the media and in their own lives.” BookPage writer Lily Mclemore concluded that Bolin’s “dryly humorous, deeply researched collection is a thoughtful critique of American culture and its disparate and disturbing fixations and fears.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Courtney Eathorne, review of Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, p. 14.
BookPage, July, 2018, Lily Mclemore, review of Dead Girls, p. 23.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of Dead Girls.
Miami New Times, June 20, 2018, Alan Scherstuhl, “‘Who Gets to Be a Girl Is Contested:’ Alice Bolin Talks Dead Girls and Women’s Pain,” interview with Alice Bolin.
Publishers Weekly, April 2, 2018, review of Dead Girls, p. 56.
Vice, June 1, 2018, Rebecca Renner, “Why America Is So Obsessed with Dead Girls,” review of Dead Girls.
ONLINE
Alice Bolin website, http://www.alicebolin.com (July 30, 2018).
Bitch Media website, http://www.bitchmedia.org/ (June 25, 2018), Dahlia Balcazar, “Sentimental Miseducation: Alice Bolin Deconstructs the Dead Girl Narrative,” interview with Alice Bolin.
Booklist Reader, http://www.booklistreader.com/ (May 30, 2018), Courtney Eathorne, “Dead Girls: Alice Bolin on the Staintly White Women Who Are Literally Killing Us,” interview with Alice Bolin.
Bustle, http://www.bustle.com/ (July 30, 2018), Sadie Trombetta, “Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls Contains One Essay That Could Explain Why Women Are So Attracted to Magic,” review of Dead Girls.
Tin House Online, http://www.tinhouse.com/ (July 30, 2018), Elissa Washuta, “Infinite Regression: A Conversation with Alice Bolin.”
University of Memphis website, http://www.memphis.edu/ (July 30, 2018), biography of Alice Bolin.
By Courtney Eathorne May 30, 2018 0 Comments
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DEAD GIRLS: Alice Bolin on the Saintly White Women Who Are Literally Killing Us
Alice Bolin, the nonfiction editor of Electric Literature’s popular web magazine Okey-Panky, is set to release her first book, Dead Girls, a sharp collection of essays due in June from William Morrow. In it, she explores society’s infatuation with a beautiful, innocent corpse, as well as the ways in which this cultural trope has affected her personally. Bolin dissects phenomena from Twin Peaks to Serial to Pretty Little Liars, meditating on how a constant barrage of macabre images might affect our collective psyche. The Booklist Reader caught up with Bolin recently to talk Dead Girls, Joan Didion, and how to survive such a dark obsession.
COURTNEY EATHORNE: What do you mean when you talk about dead girls?
ALICE BOLIN: What I think of as a dead girl or a dead girl story is a mystery or noir that opens up with the discovery of the body of a dead young woman, usually a white woman, and the rest of the story is about solving her murder. . . The thing about the dead girl is that we, as an audience, almost never identify with or understand her. If we did, those stories would be too painful to explore.
Lilly Cane
Who’s your favorite dead girl?
Lilly Kane from Veronica Mars, my favorite Dead Girl Show and one of my favorite shows of all time. Amanda Seyfried does a good job of making her this really charismatic character, but even still, she’s pretty one-dimensional. The trouble with dead girls is that they’re so often intentionally opaque.
The book is just as much memoir as is it social commentary. Did you set out to write one or the other?
I started out thinking I was writing a book of criticism. For a long time, as a nonfiction writer, I really shied away from writing very much personal stuff, But as I started working on the book, it started to become clear that what made these pieces interesting was my connection to the stuff that I was writing about, not necessarily my ideas about that stuff. Sticking to straight criticism made it feel less urgent. Explaining my stake in each issue helped bring these pieces to life.
An entire third of the book is about how you moved to Los Angeles without having ever visited. How did the dead girl trope influence your relocation to the land where so many dead girls get their start? This land of Didion and Carver?
Joan Didion definitely influenced my decision to head to LA—if it was a decision at all. I really immersed myself in her work in the years leading up to the move. I think I was trying to chase some of her spirit and her style by moving to Southern California.
You write a great deal about Didion’s vision of California as white male-centric. With your book, do you seek to criticize Didion’s canon or add to the conversation she started?
A little bit of both. Joan Didion is absolutely one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and still one of my personal favorites. Many parts of the book are in homage to her and the power of her work. But I also think it’s important to interrogate our heroes and think about how they achieved their places in society. In addition, I wanted to critique some of her conservatism and that contrarian spirit, which I think is something that she really readily acknowledges about herself. She holds herself apart from society and is deeply skeptical—it’s her strength as a writer, but it’s also her weakness, a blind spot. If you’re skeptical of everything then you’re not making any moral distinctions.
“Living dead girl” Britney Spears shaving her head, 2007
Many of your essays analyze the Los Angeles tradition of excess and our obsession with reality television, which broaches that subject. Are the stars of shows like The Hills, Pretty Wild, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians metaphorical dead girls?
A person whom I discuss quite often in the book is Britney Spears, whom I think of as a living dead girl in more of a metaphorical way. Similar to the dead girl story, there was an obsession with and a covetousness of her body that strained her and caused her to become very ill. She really encapsulates that loss of freedom and anonymity. In terms of reality TV stars, they sort of go along with that in some ways; it’s part of what they agreed to. In the book, the reality television discussion is more about the way that I have always tried to learn about the world through popular culture and how incorrect that can be.
How do dead girls relate to our societal epidemic of toxic masculinity?
Toxic masculinity is everything in dead girl stories. Even benign masculinity. . . like that of [Twin Peaks detective] Dale Cooper—a hero or an authority figure—leaves no room for femininity. It takes up all the air in the room. Our infatuation with these hero myths, with men healing themselves, edges out women’s stories of all kinds. Dead girl stories highlight our comfort with grotesque violence against women, but they’re also about silence [and] silencing women.
How do you avoid getting bogged down by our culture’s pervasive love of dead girls?
To be honest, I try to avoid it as much as I can. Before I wrote this book, I was definitely more into true crime than I am now. . . I would watch Dateline and these other murder shows. . . but now, having written this book, it’s something that I don’t do as much because I’ve sort of talked myself out of it. I’ve thought about it too much. It’s so depressing. I don’t think that our obsession with true crime is healthy or good, especially for women. Immersing yourself in all of the horrible things that could happen to you. . . it’s masochistic. I hope we as a society will start to let go and focus on other kinds of stories—but it’s easier said than done. It’s hard for me, too.
Any final thoughts you’d like to leave with readers?
I want to emphasize that the book is not only about violence against women in this pop culture trope, but also interrogating the valued position of white women in our society as paradoxically embodied by this girl who’s saintly but also dead [and has been] been horribly killed. I want to encourage white women to give up some of that privileged status because it isn’t helping us at all. It’s quite literally killing us. The racial aspects of the dead girl story are just as important as those pertaining to gender.
Infinite Regression: A Conversation with Alice Bolin
Elissa Washuta
Of Alice Bolin’s forthcoming essay collection Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, Carmen Maria Machado writes, “I love this book. I want to take it into the middle of a crowded room and hold it up and scream until someone tackles me to the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.”
These essays follow the gaze of the viewer and the imagination of the reader upon the body of the dead girl, found on TV screens, in true crime novels, and in the conjuring of iconic places. Alice’s argument shifts as her lens does, directed sometimes at this corpse-consuming culture that prefers its women dead, sometimes at herself, a participant in the devouring.
I met Alice Bolin six years ago at the edge of a crowded barroom in Missoula, Montana. She remembers that I told her I was writing about gluten; I don’t remember much, that being the time when I was deader than ever, regularly steeped in drunken resignation that I would never not be in peril. By reading her good tweets and octopus-armed essays ever since I’ve been lucky to watch the workings of this cultural critic’s curious mind. We recently spoke via Skype from our homes, Alice’s in Memphis, mine in Columbus, Ohio.
Elissa Washuta: You begin the book by saying: “This is a book about books. To try that again, it is a book about my fatal flaw: that I insist on learning everything from books.” Is it such a flaw? Do you think the learning from books is a pale comparison to learning from experience or however else people learn? I think we both learned a lot about the world from teen magazines when we were growing up in places that the teen magazines didn’t seem to care about. I don’t have any basis for comparison for having an upbringing of learning about the world more experientially than from book learning. But what do you think?
Alice Bolin: I’m glad you asked me about this because it’s something I’ve obviously been thinking about and wrestling with. What is real “experience” versus experiencing the world mediated through art? Part of the point of the book is that the experience of art is just as valid or just as much a part of life as “IRL” conversations or going to work or whatever. Art and media take up a large amount of our time, especially in this era of human existence, and those things have been just as real as other parts of my life. That’s one thing I was trying to do by marrying a critical approach with a memoir approach in the book. But at the same time, I do want to question those myths of place or myths about gender or crime, all of which are themes in the book. If we just look around us, and we look at the people who we know and at our own communities, often we know better than those myths. There were lots of things I knew about Los Angeles when I lived there because I saw them when I stepped outside. I saw the truth about race in Los Angeles, or about its neighborhoods, or what it was like to drive around. I didn’t need to read Joan Didion to learn that – and actually what she taught me was wrong, in some cases. The experience of art is a valid experience. But I think learning solely from art can be a problem.
EW: I’ve been thinking about the way you construct place on the page. The first essay in the book established the Dead Girl Show concept. And you open with Twin Peaks, which is set not far from where you grew up. And then in the second essay, you move to Moscow, Idaho, your hometown, and you’re writing about the American West and what you say is the “embodiment of the twin ideals of beauty and terror.” And you move to another place in the West, Los Angeles. There’s such a sharp contrast between living in a place that’s iconic and living in a place that people can’t quite picture. I’m wondering if you felt differences in the crafting of those places on the page for a reader. A place that’s mythic, iconic, one that readers already feel like they know even if they haven’t been there. And then one that you have the opportunity to construct from scratch for most readers.
AB: Los Angeles is a place that is very iconic, but at the same time it’s difficult to conceive of or picture if you’ve never been there. When I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was like what the fuck? It’s kind of quirky and crime-ridden and full of weirdos, and I was like, what? This isn’t Hollywood. Because I was thinking Hollywood was like a red carpet stretched along the street and Cate Blanchett would be standing there or whatever. For me writing about Los Angeles was building it from the ground up, looking around me and being like, this is not what I pictured. In fact, I sort of pictured nothing—I had nothing to picture. All I could think about were these concepts, like show business and celebrity and even the ocean. It all felt very abstract to me.
Writing about Moscow and the Northwest was different because I was trying to describe this landscape that is quite strange – describing these steep rolling hills that exist in northern Idaho and eastern Washington in a way people would be able to picture, or at least might be tempted to Google.
EW: Right now, I’m working on a book chapter that’s largely about where I grew up. I’ve been learning all these new things about my home and the way that it was culturally constructed that I didn’t know. Like I didn’t know until very recently the first Friday the 13th film was filmed very close to where I grew up. It’s a process of researching and then rendering a place that was so familiar to me that I thought it was the center of the universe. In writing the book, did you have any moments when your home became strange to you?
AB: This is so depressing but the main time that happened was when I was researching the two mass shootings that happened in Moscow within five years of each other. The second one was committed by one of my high school classmates. But really what shook me was the one that happened first, in 2006. I read this series of articles done on it by a Boise paper. That’s far away from Moscow and so it had this outsider’s framing of the town. All the landmarks they were talking about, they were places that I knew really well, but they were populated with people who I didn’t quite understand. It gave me a lens on a place where I had never lived as an adult. It felt a little darker or a little weirder.
What you’re saying is really interesting because when I talk to my students, I point to you as a writer who researches herself and edits her own history, who really actively interrogates and pushes against that previous version of herself. I always try to get students to research the places where they’re from, the places they think they know so well.
EW: That’s why I think it’s so great to leave home and go somewhere else for a while, or forever. It’s kind of ridiculous for me when I look back at the things that I thought were just things that were true of everywhere. Like I thought there were fluorescent rocks everywhere. No, there are just fluorescent rocks in Warren and Sussex County, New Jersey. I’m sure they’re—I was going to say they’re everywhere, but there are not fluorescent rocks everywhere. Or iconic diners, that’s a very New Jersey thing. But I have a lot of culturally instilled doubt about how I know what I know, and whether I really know what I know, and whether I really am an authority on even my own experience. I’ve tried to use that. Because I can’t get rid of it. I’m always looking up words in the dictionary that I know very well and use all the time but I’m not sure that I really know them. Instead of just letting that destroy me, I’m trying to actually use it to strengthen my craft.
AB: I’m wondering if that’s something common to women writers. I mean, obviously, it is.
EW: Yeah.
AB: That self-doubt. But I have always thought of it as a strength too because as a critic I always doubt myself. I have the strength of my convictions, I know my opinion, but at the same time, I am terrified of being wrong in material ways or not being convincing enough. So I’m always the person who has their ducks in a row. I will go back and re-watch my favorite movie that I’ve seen 800 times if I’m going to write about it. It’s something actually in the past couple of years I’ve tried to stop myself from doing as much because I feel like it makes it less fun to read when the whole piece is just, “Here’s why I know what I know.” But at the same time, it’s something I try to teach my students, to be rigorous and to follow up, to question even the things you think you know.
EW: It’s interesting that you bring up the fear of being wrong–I want to talk to you about my experience of first reading that essay “A Teen Witch’s Guide to Staying Alive.” You first published that in a different form at Broadly. The essay is about teen witchcraft and literature that informed it for you, and you bring in an examination of my second book Starvation Mode. I loved the way you brought the book into this witchcraft examination, and I was honestly a little freaked out in a good way. I don’t think we had talked outside of Twitter for a while so I don’t think you would have known this, but really around that time I had just started reading my own tarot cards, I was getting into astrology, I had just started casting spells weeks before. But I didn’t feel that I had the right to call myself a witch because that seemed like it was on the other side of this velvet rope, guarded by the personified form of a Geocities website telling me that I couldn’t be a witch without some kind of a coven initiation. So even though Starvation Mode isn’t explicitly about witchcraft at all, I felt like you saw it and you saw me and you saw something in me and in my work that I didn’t even see. So your essay was like this conjuring. It had a real impact on me.
AB: This is very sweet!
EW: It’s true!
AB: When I heard the description of Starvation Mode, which I bought and read immediately when it was published, I was like oh it sounds so witchy. I just had an intuition that it would fit in with some of this stuff that I was reading and writing about, especially thinking about Shirley Jackson and the ways that food is used in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Food, this site of feminine control, is very witchy. Even in the Christian Eucharist, there is this spell that is said over bread, transforming it into a person’s body. I think that My Body Is A Book of Rules is a witchy book too but at the edges. In my mind I cannot remember the exact thing that made me be like, oh yes Starvation Mode will fit in with the teen witch essay. I just knew it immediately, like we were traveling on the same stream.
EW: It’s witch intuition.
AB: This spring I reread My Body Is A Book of Rules and saw all the stuff you wrote about magazines, which is something I’ve been thinking about and writing about, and it’s like oh yes! It all goes together, these ideas about girlhood and all the strange childhood rituals that we just take for granted.
EW: It’s amazing the way that through cultural criticism you’re able to create something, see something the author put there and didn’t realize was there. And you’re able to create a new annex to the work by doing that. And that gets me thinking again about this idea of learning things from books. I wonder whether maybe there are some things that can only be learned from books because that’s where the creation of some knowledge happens.
AB: Right. There’s something there that’s ineffable. I always connect it to the idea of the overtone in choral music, where certain harmonies will create another note that no one is singing. That catalyst, that overtone, is the way that a good essay works. All of these threads are playing in concert and they create something that’s only there in the margins or in the low notes. That’s why as a nonfiction writer I like to write about nonfiction. I feel like Dead Girls is such a book about nonfiction–kind of an infinite regression–but it’s fun for me to draw out those overtones and create something explicit from things that were implicit.
EW: The other day you tweeted something that I was thinking about for days. You wrote about this being “a book about how the constant fear of being murdered by men constrains women’s freedom + about our giddy obsession with real life + fictional murder stories.” Then you tweeted about not being sure about whether the Dead Girl genre is redeemable. And so for days, I was thinking about how much I’m drawn to the Dead Girl genre, and also about how often in my life I’ve been afraid of being murdered by men. There have been times when I’m living my life, going to my job, doing my whatever, and all the while I’m privately terrified of some specific man who I’m afraid my kill me–various men, at various times in my life. No matter how much pain and fear I’m feeling, I can only really tell my closest friends and we talk it out together. It’s easy to feel like there’s nobody to care, nobody to help. For me, this is the appeal of the Dead Girl genre. In real life, there’s no Agent Cooper who’s going to figure this out for me. So in TV and movies, we’ve got either that hero guy figure or if not, at least all of us in the audience are looking at this Dead Girl together, we’re all caring together. That’s sort of reassuring. It’s like I’m being cared for by proxy. So for me, that’s what makes the genre redeemable: a way of finding comfort in a dangerous and generally uncaring world. But I’m wondering what’s behind the question for you? What makes you think it might be redeemable?
AB: Oh I have many thoughts. You’re totally right about that hero figure. That it is such cold consolation to think that the only thing we can really hope for is someone to care if we are killed.
EW: Yeah!
AB: We can’t even wish to not be killed.
EW: Right.
AB: That’s the thing that does make it feel like, should we even try to subvert the genre? I think that women want to be confronted with some kind of reality. We are always facing this fear of violence, so things in the media that show us that violence makes us feel like, OK I’m not crazy, this could happen to me, these threats are out there. But at the same time, those stories in the media are also warnings to us. They are ways to police women by saying, “Don’t be like her.” Because ultimately it isn’t like, “Let’s stop men from acting that way,” it’s like, “Let’s protect the women” or “Let’s solve their cases.” So I have to think about the impact that being able to identify with victims on screen has for women with this other effect that it maintains us in this state of absolute terror.
But I think about My Body is a Book of Rules a lot when it comes to this question because it’s a book that’s hard to read and it is intense and it does talk a lot about violence, but it also really forces the reader to reckon with a woman who is going to tell them her experience and who is not going to back away and is not going to die, who is going to be there through the whole thing. That to me is the opposite of the Dead Girl Show. You use stuff like Law & Order SVU or other Dead Girl icons, even saints in the Catholic church, to amplify your own voice. That’s when I think, if we can allow women’s imaginations to play with these stories, then maybe there is a redemptive effect. But it takes a leap that I see mostly in literature at this point and less in other kinds of media.
EW: I’m thinking again of that idea of the book as the site of experience. In the book that’s the only place where I’m able to have that experience, or that’s the place where I’m freest to have the experience of telling someone about my fear and my pain. That’s not a real-life experience I have that often. The book is a site of freedom where, at least in drafting and revising, I’m not constrained by anybody else.
AB: That was true for me too in writing my book. Even as I say we should be careful of learning everything from books, I think you’re right that that moment of confrontation that can happen with another person and that moment of freedom is unique to literature, for right now anyway. Maybe because of the time it takes to read a book, and because it’s silent and individual, and because at this point writing is not really that lucrative.
Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, a collection of essays forthcoming from Morrow/HarperCollins on June 26, 2018. Preorder here.
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a writer of personal essays and memoir. She is the author of two books, Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction, forthcoming from University of Washington Press. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Potlatch Fund, and Hugo House. Elissa is an assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University.
Sentimental MiseducationAlice Bolin Deconstructs the Dead Girl Narrative
by Dahlia Balcazar
Published on June 25, 2018 at 10:37am
Alice Bolin author photo.JPG
Alice Bolin (Photo credit: photo by the author)
From Nicole Brown Simpson to JonBenét Ramsey, Twin Peaks to Pretty Little Liars, the Dead Girl trope has haunted American media and pop culture decade after decade. In her new essay collection, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, Alice Bolin picks apart our cultural preoccupation with Dead Girl stories to examine the misogyny and racism that so often lie just underneath. Bolin’s references run a delightful gamut from James Baldwin to True Detective to the 2010 reality TV show Pretty Wild to emphasize just how pervasive the Dead Girl trope has become—and interrogate how little its core script has changed. Bolin seamlessly blends self-examination and pop-culture criticism, whether she’s chronicling life in Los Angeles, the spiritual nexus of true crime, reflecting on the cult appeal of the teen-werewolf film Ginger Snaps and the novelist Shirley Jackson, or confronting white women’s complicity in white supremacy.
Bitch recently talked to Bolin about the problem with sentimental-education narratives, finding her own voice in the personal-essay tradition, and how detective stories let us overlook real injustice.
Are there any books, movies, or shows you’d want to include an essay on if you were writing Dead Girls right now?
People ask me or email me like, “Oh, are you going to write about The Night Of?” or [whatever] new Dead Girl thing that’s happening. And I feel like I already wrote about it, like I already said my piece. I wrote the “Dead Girl Show” essay because I was tired of that trope and didn’t really want to watch or write about those shows anymore at all. Lately I’ve become much more interested in survivor stories—in Final Girls instead of Dead Girls, especially with #MeToo and ideas about survivors and the way that they navigate the world.
You cite a lot of personal essayists and memoirists in Dead Girls. Who are some of your favorites to read?
Joan Didion is a pretty obvious influence, since much of the book is about her. I love Joan Didion so much, and I feel like she really influenced the way I think and write about place. But I have a lot of favorites; I tend to love essayists [who] merge the personal and the critical and who have kind of a wacky voice or outlook. I love Terry Castle—The Professor is one of my favorite books of all time—and The Possessed by Elif Batuman. Those two go together because they’re sort of these adventures in literature, but at the same time there’s a lot of revelation happening about the inner life of the reader/writer. I love Eula Biss, too: Notes From No Man’s Land is amazing, and On Immunity. Hilton Als is one of my very favorite writers ever; he uses criticism as a way to interrogate the world around him and his own experience. [His criticism] is very personal, and also very imaginative—it opens up possibilities instead of closing them off.
Dead Girl stories are ultimately about uncovering female darkness and revealing male innocence.
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There are essays in Dead Girls about your time living in and learning about Los Angeles. How do you see the connection between the city and the Dead Girl trope?
I feel like the American West in general is very important in the evolution of the Dead Girl trope because we still see it as the frontier or the great unknown. People still [have] this prospector mentality, [like L.A. is] a place where you go to reinvent yourself, and I think those kinds of realities play really well into crime stories. Crime stories are often about hidden identities or self-made men or women, so to me it feels very appropriate.
Moving to Los Angeles and learning about L.A. and California is central to the narrative of the book because it was a coming-of-age moment for me. But it also exemplified experiences I’ve had my whole life [of] learning about the things that surround me through books rather than through life experience. I had these parallel streams in my life: the L.A. that I lived in every day and the L.A. that I learned about [through] reading.
Toward the end of Dead Girls you ask yourself the question: How can I use the personal essay instead of letting it use me? What do you think the answer is now?
I feel like I’m still figuring it out. But when I wrote that, I was thinking about not falling into patterns—in any kind of genre of writing, [but] especially in this genre that has become very feminized. The personal-essay tradition has many [women] greats, but you also have to think, once a genre becomes codified: What is the political end that it’s used for? What kind of stories are usually told? In what ways are those genre conventions holding up accepted ideas?
I think most great essayists have a kind of self-interrogation or skepticism about the self and the persona that they’re writing in. Janet Malcolm, who I should have mentioned earlier—she’s one of my favorite writers of all time—she’s very, very interested in the forms of nonfiction and the ways that we experience the self through psychoanalysis, or court cases, or in true crime. Those ways that we think about the truth and the ways we present the truth.
I feel like a kind of self-interrogation and looking inward, turning the camera back, is really the only way to make sure you’re not just reproducing stories that have already been told or that make your audience comfortable. Thinking about why you’re telling the story you’re telling and how you come off. Mary Karr writes about that in The Art of Memoir, about the ways that the battling selves become the plot in a lot of nonfiction.
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Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin (Photo credit: William Morrow)
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You write that in most Dead Girls shows, the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems, which we see in shows like Twin Peaks and True Detective. Is there pop culture that you think pushes back on that framing?
Something I’m wrestling with right now is whether subverting the Dead Girl trope is the way to go, or should we be trying to push back against that kind of mode of storytelling and not make everything a mystery that can be solved? I think there are Dead Girl shows that do subvert a lot of tropes. Pretty Little Liars and a lot of really silly teen shows like Riverdale, in [their] pulpy-ness and how over the top they go and how many rules they break, do in some ways undermine the rules of the Dead Girl show. They make it so they’re not really solving any problems, they’re not coming into any existential answer. They’re just winding their way through this maze that’s been created by violence and misogyny. It’s more like Alice in Wonderland than Sherlock Holmes.
I’ve said before that we will never have a real conversation about victims’ rights or decarceration or prison reform or sexual assault and harassment until we stop framing everything as a detective story, until we stop being so obsessed with these murder stories, and until we see that having everything resolved in the end, as satisfying as it is, is not the truth. That’s a narrative that [lets] us overlook all kinds of injustice.
I was really struck by the line: “Violent men’s grievances are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence. They’re never the instigators. They’re only righting what has been done to them.” I’m thinking about the recent attack in Toronto and about Elliot Rodger and other misogynist mass murderers. Is there a way that you see the media narrative around these attacks—especially the need to humanize these killers—as related to the Dead Girl trope?
Dead Girl stories are ultimately about uncovering female darkness and revealing male innocence. Even when there’s a woman at the center—like Veronica Mars, say—it’s about uncovering the darkness within her. What happened to me? Why did I change? Why did I become dark? Dead Girl stories focus on male innocence and vulnerability because they often reveal male wickedness, so it’s about flipping the script, essentially—we see the detectives in True Detective crying and confronting this evil that’s so much bigger than them.
James Baldwin said the same thing when he wrote about white people being obsessed with their own innocence. I think it is about sort of an inherited guilt where it’s like, “I didn’t do it. Don’t blame me. I didn’t enslave anyone. I didn’t kill any Native Americans.” I feel like this sort of virulent misogyny that results in mass violence is related, because it’s about a self-centered conviction in the perpetrator’s own innocence and their victimhood.
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In the book’s last essay, “Accomplices,” you write about white women’s complicity in white supremacy. Why did that feel important for you to address?
The ways that white women participate in their own oppression [connect to] the ways we dwell on, or participate in, or create Dead Girl narratives. I felt like it was my job to try to deconstruct some of those narratives that hold up white female supremacy and value and think about [how] gender and race come together in crime narratives. The ways in which Dead Girl narratives prop up white women are relatively obvious, that it’s like our deaths [or] our lives matter more if we are the victims of brutal violence; there are lots of victims of violence who are not treated in the same way.
I also feel like there are more ambiguous survivor stories about white women. I talk about Patty Hearst in the book, [as well as] the traditional sentimental-education narrative of Jamesian novels about a white woman being put through the wringer, who loses her innocence and learns about the world. I was really attached to that notion of myself as well, and [in] my first year in L.A. I had to undo that in order to come to any kind of maturity or happiness. We love those sentimental-education stories, and I was attached to them because [they promised] that I wouldn’t have to work on myself—the world would work on me. I came to see the passivity, essentially, in the stories of many white women. I felt that it was my duty in telling my own story to illuminate my own complicity and not think about myself as somebody whose experience happened to them but somebody who collaborated in creating those experiences. Even the negative ones.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity
Why America Is So Obsessed with Dead Girls
In her new collection of essays, "Dead Girls," author Alice Bolin examines entertainment about dead women to help us understand how misogyny shapes media—and how media feeds misogyny.
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Rebecca Renner
Jun 1 2018, 5:21pm
Laura Palmer of "Twin Peaks" (L), Harriet Vanger of "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."
During a year when male resentment toward women is violently coming to a head—a school shooting brought on by jilted teenage desire, a man driving through a crowd of pedestrians because women won’t have sex with him—a book like Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession feels particularly relevant. In the entertaining and highly anticipated collection of essays , which comes out June 26, Bolin examines the phenomenon of what she calls “Dead Girl Shows” and other similar media that revolve around a woman’s murder in an attempt to understand why America is so obsessed with the subgenre—and, in turn, learn something new about America’s deep-rooted misogyny.
Considering how long feminists have been demanding that women be seen and treated as whole people, it’s remarkable how prevalent and popular Dead Girl Shows are—but perhaps, accounting for backlash, not necessarily surprising. Bolin touches on TV shows Pretty Little Liars, True Detective, How to Get Away with Murder, Making a Murderer, Dateline NBC, Cold Case Files, and others . In the podcast realm, there’s Dirty John, Serial, and so many more. There are thousands of books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts I could list here. Audiences (both men and women alike) devour them. But what does that say about us?
Bolin attempts to answer that by identifying tropes in some of the most popular pieces of media in the subgenre, teasing out what it is about these dead girls that may be keeping our eyes and psyches glued. "Twin Peaks’s plot is sparked by the murdered body of seventeen-year-old Laura Palmer, washed up on the bank of the river,” Bolin writes of the David Lynch cult classic. “Palmer’s corpse is Twin Peaks’s truly memorable image: river-wet hair slicked around her perfect porcelain face, blue with death but still tranquil, lovely.” Palmer is little more than a set piece, Bolin points out. She is a canvas on which to paint the character of the male detective investigating her death—a “neutral arena on which to work out male problems.”
Similarly, Bolin notes, Harriet Vanger—the disappeared woman in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—is explicitly regarded as a “puzzle” for Mikael Blomkvist, the book’s journalist investigator. “The implication of this choice of vocabulary, if I am being uncharitable, could not be more clear: that women are problems to be solved, and the problem of absence, a disappearance or murder, is generally easier to deal with than the problem of the woman’s presence,” Bolin muses. The investigator becomes obsessed with the Dead Girl, and often, that obsession is tinged with a sexual charge that mirrors the killer’s desire for murder, she notes.
Each has its own nuances, but the tropes that Bolin examines largely point to one implicit desire on the part of both writers and viewers: for women to embody ultimate submission. And the most interesting parts of the book are the (too infrequent) moments in which Bolin explicitly ties those tropes to social phenomena and statistics in real life—in which we can clearly see how these stories both reflect and perpetuate a dangerous relationship to women. Early in the book, for instance, Bolin cites several statistics that show why plots in which the husband is the culprit are considered predictable: Three women die at the hands of a their partners every single day, domestic violence murders accounted for the deaths of some 11,700 women between 2001 and 2012; and in 56 percent of mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, a spouse, former spouse, or other family member were among the victims.
Through these connections, we begin to understand the dark reality of what is at stake in the question of: Why we are so obsessed with murdered women in fiction? “Crime stories are ubiquitous in our culture not only for their transgressive lure but for their power to reinforce social order,” Bolin writes. She goes on to reference Joan Didion’s 1990 essay “Sentimental Journeys,” in which Didion details the Central Park jogger case, which centered around the brutal rape of a Wall Street investment banker and the arrest, trial, coerced confession, and conviction of the four Black and one Latino suspects in the crime. “In the Central Park jogger case, black men and white women were cast not only as opposites but as natural enemies,” Bolin points out. Just like the murdered women in entertainment about violent crime, the female victim in the case became a canvas on which to project the racist fears and social anxieties of others.
Laura Palmer's corpse in Twin Peaks. Courtesy Netflix.
Presumably because of the intended scope of the book, however, there are few more instances in which Bolin ventures beyond examining media and into the broader conversation about American misogyny and constructed social hierarchies. Finishing the collection, I was left wondering how these depictions relate to things like pick-up artist communities, rape on university campuses, and violence against sex workers. And in particular, I was left reflecting on the actions of Canadian Alek Minassian, who drove a van through a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing ten people. Before going on this rampage, Minassian allegedly made a cryptic Facebook post linking his attack to the “Incel” (involuntary celibate) community—an online group overrun with men angry that they can’t get women to have sex with them.
Of course, I don’t believe Dead Girl Shows are the cause of Minassian’s rage, or that of men like him. But I do believe that the prevalence of their tropes and Minassian’s murderous rampage are both symptoms of societal gender roles that, for centuries, have told us that women are meant to serve men. And so, in my simplified theorization: At a time when, in real life, men are increasingly losing their dominance over women, Dead Girl Shows offer an acceptable opportunity to see women in the most extreme state of submission—merely a beautiful corpse.
To try to understand if there’s actual validity to this theory, I reached out to Linda Ong, chief culture officer at Civic Entertainment Group, which advises the TV industry on consumer sensibilities. “Today, the popularity of crime programming can be attributed in part to the shifting view of women in society,” she said. “Viewers with more traditional tastes like to see men and women in traditional gender roles. They’re used to seeing women portrayed as victims…The success of the Dirty John podcast is a great example of this.”
Dr. Kimberly Davies, professor of sociology and chair of the department of social sciences at Augusta University, offered me another explanation: Crime shows that center on the murder of a woman play on the fears of women. “Men are far more likely to be victims of violent crime,” says Davies. “But women fear it more.” (In 2015, 78 percent of murder victims were men, and 20.9 percent were women.) But to her, that doesn't contradict Bolin’s suggestion that Dead Girl media works to enforce a social hierarchy.
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“I watch a lot of English crime shows. When there’s a woman out in the middle of nowhere, in the woods, we know something’s going to happen,” Davies said. “That’s a way of keeping women in their place…[it] shows victims in a light that suggests they contribute to their victimization.” In Dead Girl Shows, just like in rape cases, she said, “You know what the woman was doing, what she was wearing, where she was…” In other words, Dead Girl Shows make the dead girl’s victimization seem inevitable and deserved.
In terms of why Dead Girl Shows are so popular right now, though, Ong had a theory I hadn’t considered—which takes a slightly more optimistic view of things by focusing less on the murder and more on the plot’s resolution. “We’re living in a time of extreme disorientation in this country, so content with themes of danger, chaos, questionable ethics and injustice feel relevant to consumers right now,” she said. “Culture is thirsty for investigation and resolution today. Trying to solve crimes offers viewers hope, purpose, and progress—or at least makes them feel that way.”
alice bolin photo
Hi! I’m Alice Bolin, and I’m a writer who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. I currently teach creative nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.
I mostly write longish-form critical essays about literature, music, and pop culture. Some special areas of interest are murder, country music, makeup, social media, poetry, and twentieth century women writers. You can read my essays here.
My first collection of essays, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, will be published by Morrow/HarperCollins on June, 26, 2018. It’s about place, crime, gender, and genre. You can preorder it!
I received my MFA in poetry from the University of Montana, and I have also published a lot of poems and stories. I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Is that interesting?
I’m represented by Monika Woods at Curtis Brown. Follow me on Twitter; I am always online.
Alice Bolin's 'Dead Girls' Contains One Essay That Could Explain Why Women Are So Attracted To Magic
BySadie Trombetta
3 weeks ago
From Serial to Veronica Mars, True Detective to Pretty Little Liars, Making a Murderer to Dateline NBC, it is safe to say that America has a Dead Girl obsession. In her debut essay collection Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, writer Alice Bolin examines this lasting cultural fascination with murdered women in pop culture and in literature. With subtle humor and a sharp critical eye, she explores the troublesome tropes that leave women abused, silenced, and discarded in thousands of books, movies, TV shows, and even podcasts, revealing that, more often than not, the Dead Girl is merely "a neutral arena on which to work out male problems."
Throughout her collection, Bolin attempts to unearth a kind of cultural lesson from shows like Twin Peaks and books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which the murdered or disappeared woman isn't a fully formed being but rather a prop male characters can use to help them solve some internal or external conflict of their own. The Dead Girl trope, Bolin argues, can actually teach us a lot about ourselves and the stranglehold misogyny has on American society as a whole — but so too can those rare instances of female survival. In her essay "A Teen Witch's Guide to Staying Alive," Bolin reveals one told women can use to escape the fate of the Dead Girl: magic.
"My first formal dalliance with witchcraft was in fourth grade, though my suspicious that I was magic came much earlier," Bolin writes in her essay, echoing a feeling shared by many girls who grew up in the '90s with Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Craft, and Teen Witch. "As a small child, I would tighten my concentration on objects, thinking I might move them with my mind. I engaged in experiments in mind reading, which if you don't let your subject in on it, is easy to tell yourself you are doing successfully. At the same time I also engaged in schoolyard charlatanism, shoving the planchette around when we played with the Ouija board and convincing a gullible friend that I communicated with leprechauns, a ruse that went off so well I had to continue it for years."
Like a lot of women who came of age in the 1990s, myself included, Bolin was drawn to the idea of herself as a teen witch, someone with the power to control not just themselves, but their circumstances and those around them. In a culture in which young girls are constantly stripped of their voices and their power, the prospect of magic is beyond appealing. It's a necessary tool for survival. That is why generations of women have turned to it, not just as wannabe teen witches or practicing Wiccans, but as readers and consumers of pop culture, too. "The imagination as the source of childhood 'magic' is the cliche that drives basically all youth entertainment," Bolin explains in her essay. "In that case, magic means nothing more than control."
Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin, $13, Amazon
The pull of the teen witch is something a lot of women can relate to, and it's also a powerful trope that shows up across the literary landscape. Witch stories are, at their core, feminist narratives about women reclaiming their power and regaining their control in a world that relentlessly attempts to do the opposite.
Take one of the most famous literary teen witches, Merricat Blackwood from Shirley Jackson's classic We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Though she may be a murderer who uses a kind of botanical magic to kill her family, Merricat remains the heroine of the story because her motives aren't sinister at all. They are about self-preservation, and sisterly love. As Bolin explains:
"She wants to protect herself and what's left of her family — her older sister, Constance, and her feeble uncle, Julian — from the ignorant townspeople in the hostile village beyond their land. Merricat is one in a long line of literary tomboys, taking her place beside Scout Finch, Harriet the Spy, and Jo March. But Jackson twists this archetype, imbuing her tomboy with a sinister mixture of alchemy and fear. When Merricat's routine is threatened early in the book, she immediately reacts by smashing a milk pitcher, as smashing things into glittering shards is one course of her power. Her feral girl magic is far from RavenWolf's benign Teen Witches. We learn that someone poisoned her father, mother, younger brother, and aunt years earlier, and Merricat is the reader's only suspect. This is Jackson's unseasy feat in the book: readers' sympathetic intimacy with our strange and murderous narrator."
Despite her obvious flaws and unlikability, Merricat wins the heart of the reader, largely because of Jackson's masterful portrayal of her as a young girl desperate for control over a life she sees as spiraling out of her hands. Like so many other teen witches in literature and in pop culture, Merricat's powers are deadly and destructive, but don't they have to be in order to effectively compete with the death and destruction of misogyny?
The teen witch is not the perfect character, but she offers an irresistible alternative to the Dead Girl trope. She may abuse, she may kill, but it beats being abused and being killed. As Bolin points, Miranda from Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching fills the same kind of role. The novel, Bolin writes, "proliferates indecisively with references to myths and fairy tales, not sure if Miranda is a wicked witch from Western fairy tales or the soucouyant, the evil hag in Caribbean folktales who eat children's souls. She is either Alice in Wonderland, Eurydice, or Narnia's White Witch. Or she might be an inversion of one of these familiar stories, a princess trying desperately to escape her fairy godmother."
Bolin admits that these roles fictional women like Miranda and Merricat, play are "imperfect or failed strategies for living while female," but they certainly beat the alternative: the Dead Girl, the prop, the tool. As Bolin explains, "It's clear that if both good and bad witches are going to find ways to survive, their methods will not always be ones we approve of, but they are effective methods nonetheless. In these stories, women are not just vessels for men's issues. They are their own ships, and in charge of their own navigation.
As they do in fiction, girls and women in real life long to have the magical powers of protection and self-preservations. That is why so many of us have laid our fingers on Ouija boards and pushed for the answers we want. It's why as teens we picked up spell books like Silver RavenWolf's iconic 1998 book Teen Witch in search of charms like the Chameleon Spell. "It is a meditation exercise, in which the spell caster must memorize a magic poem, 'then practice making the edges of [herself] fuzzy while chanting the poem.' This spell is, in other words, the same thing that girls do in hallways, classrooms, and walking down the street: close their eyes and pray to be less conspicuous, less exposed," Bolin writes. "This is why We Have Always Lived in the Castle's fairytale ending is so moving. Jackson's weird sisters achieve what every teen witch seeks: if not love, at least invisibility."
“Who Gets to Be a Girl Is Contested”: Alice Bolin Talks Dead Girls and Women’s Pain
Alan Scherstuhl | June 20, 2018 | 8:00am
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Dead Girls, the first collection by critic and essayist Alice Bolin, would stand as one of this year’s essential reads even without that striking, of-the-moment title. The book kicks off with the indispensable essay, “Toward a Theory of a Dead Girl Show,” which with great wit and skepticism examines the phenomenon of TV (and film and novel and true-crime) narratives that center on the murder or kidnapping of a beautiful white teen. It’s urgent, necessary criticism, but don’t think that’s all Dead Girls offers. Like the shows she’s considering, Bolin soon expands out from comely corpses to survey a wider world, in this case many of her pop obsessions: Swedish mystery novels, the work of Joan Didion, Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison, Britney Spears, the treatment in true-crime literature of murders that have long fascinated her hometown, Moscow, Idaho.
Dead Girls finds the author making sense of our darkest interests, shining a light on uncomfortable truths. It’s also as engaging as it is insightful, the kind of book you might steal a couple of minutes with at work when you think nobody’s watching.
I recently spoke to Bolin by phone.
You note in the book that by using the title Dead Girls you are in a way part of the same Dead Girls machine that profits off our culture’s fascination with dead girls. Why is the word girl or girls in so many titles?
The word is slippery. Who gets to be a girl is something that’s contested in our culture and is really wrapped up in whiteness and also sexuality and innocence and the contradictions between them. All that is probably why so many thrillers have that word in them. There’s dead girl shows but not dead woman shows. Laura Palmer [of Twin Peaks] is a girl who dies at 17, but she doesn’t really look like a girl. She’s sexually mature. Amy in Gone Girl is like 37 years old or something.
You write that Amy — in the book and the film — is a construction that resembles no woman who has ever existed, but that what the story suggests is that there’s something scarier to our culture than women being abused or killed or going missing.
Right, Gone Girl really plays to these nightmare scenarios that even sort-of decent men entertain about being misunderstood or accused of something they didn’t do. It ties into all of these me-too boogeyman fears where the idea of a woman being victimized is less terrifying than the thought of a man being falsely accused.
You write about the masculine fantasy of control that is at the root of a lot of these narratives. When a girl like Laura Palmer is dead, she’s no longer out of control.
There are these dual myths in a funny way between control and innocence. Innocence is something that white people believe that they have, and that in a lot of stories men believe that they have. I think about something James Baldwin said, that in a noir story the man is the innocent and the femme fatale the guilty party, even if the man is some gangster who’s killed a million people. That idea of innocence is something that privileged people hold onto really tightly. Being questioned or revealed as less innocent than we are is something that makes privileged people feel out of control. So I think that is something that leads to a lot of the ugliness that we see in real-life violence and in on-screen and fictional violence, attempts to recapture that control and all the being innocent and pure and beautiful affords us.
Writing about the dead girls who launch pop narratives like Twin Peaks or Veronica Mars you describe a “sanctifying haze” around them. Does the dead girl — the Black Dahlia or Lilly Kane — come to be seen as more innocent because of her death?
Oh, yes. Greil Marcus writes the best about all the different versions of Laura Palmer, how she’s not the same character at all from Twin Peaks to Fire Walk With Me to The Return and that David Lynch doesn’t even really try to make all the details line up. But we know that like Britney Spears, she’s not that innocent. Her death absolutely is what absolves her and makes her a symbol of purity. Lilly Kane in Veronica Mars is also a bad girl. For them, becoming a dead girl is both a kind of punishment and also a merciful honor-killing sort of act.
You describe the dead girl’s opposite, the femme fatale, as a problem to be solved.
Quite often with the femme fatale, if you strip away the writers’ disdain you’ll see she’s just a woman who has survived. A woman who has not ended up as a dead girl becomes a femme fatale because there’s a sort of fundamental level of manipulation at the heart of these characters. Lilly Kane and Laura Palmer both have the femme fatale hallmarks of manipulating men, being too crafty and clever for their own good, being a little bit mysterious, being attracted to older men.
You get at some of these same points in your chapter on Britney Spears, who you just mentioned. You write about how despite having known the song for years, the cry of loneliness at the heart of “Baby One More Time” didn’t penetrate your brain until recently. Why is it easy in this culture to miss the pain that a Britney is expressing?
I think it’s two things. These Max Martin Swedish-generated lyrics from that era of pop music, maybe ’98 to 2001, really make no sense. There’s “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely” by the Backstreet Boys where they sing, “Loneliness has always been a friend of mine.” The word lonely was sort of in the lexicon and being regenerated by the pop-lyric computer. So, there’s that. As for Britney singing, “Hit me baby one more time,” well, what does she mean? Is she playing blackjack? Is it a sadomasochism thing? That’s something that has never been resolved.
But there is a level where we don’t really want to extend compassion to these female icons. I think there’s a reason why women like Cher or Britney Spears or even Lindsay Lohan have been in a way rescued by the gay community, where they’re appreciated for their talent and glamour but also as human beings who have felt pain. But this patriarchal uber culture is reluctant to acknowledge women’s pain, especially of women who are young and successful.
One argument in the book stunned me. You write about the character of the profiler, who in so many mysteries teases out all the highly specific odd traits of the killer. The fictional profiler’s profiles are at odds with what’s actually the truth in most real-life murders of women, that the husband did it. You suggest that our pop narratives’ insistence on the killer not being the obvious person makes it hard for us to recognize the profile in real life.
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I have a lot of skepticism about the whole mindhunter thing that is really common in the true-crime genre. They’ll say, “The killer is probably a Marine, probably [5-foot-8],” like they have a psychic ability to identify the murderer. It speaks to this ideal of a detective who has essentially supernatural abilities and also our trust in forensic psychology. Even our ideas of what a sociopath or psychopath is remains wrapped in a lot of doubt and prejudices we have about crime and are not as scientific as what we want them to be. So, that’s something I have trouble with. It makes it easy to shake off the people we don’t want to suspect. A lot of time the actual profile would be, “He’s a man, a white man who probably has some privilege. You might not have guessed that it’s him, but it is.”
There’s a type of dead woman I see in entertainment a lot, one you don’t look at at length in the book. That’s the dead wife, whose murder in movies like Upgrade or Deadpool 2 gives the hero an excuse to avenge her. She’s less an object of fascination than she is a narrative device.
It happens all the time. In the show 24, the president’s wife is murdered. The detective in so many books has lost his daughter. But we don’t really hear about the daughter or the wife — they’re not really important other than as a wrinkled snapshot in his wallet. She’s a wrinkle in his psyche. Even in that horrible recent Godzilla movie, isn’t it Juliette Binoche who gets killed? Even though the dead girl has a mystique about her and propels the narrative, it’s really not that different. The thing that all these narratives are invested in is making women less human, using them as plot devices and making sure that we are slightly saddened by her death but that we never empathize with her. It’s all part and parcel of the same shit. The dead girl is just a little bit more symbolically fertile. The wife is a pretty stale image for us; the teenage girl has a lot more to work with.
Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession (William Morrow, $15.99) hits bookstores on June 26
Alice Bolin
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Bolin, Alice: DEAD GIRLS
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bolin, Alice DEAD GIRLS Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $15.99 6, 26 ISBN: 978-0-06-265714-5
In this engrossing debut collection of essays, Bolin (Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of Memphis) looks at two things: America's cultural obsession with dead girls in works of literature and on TV and Los Angeles from the perspective of both a newcomer and a veteran.
"Our refusal to address warning signs that are so common they have become cliche means we are not failing to prevent violence but choosing not to," writes the author, the former nonfiction editor of Electric Literature's literary magazine, Okey-Panky. In fact, according to Bolin, Americans demonstrate a specific fascination with watching women die on screen, seeing them lose control over their lives to abusive husbands and societies, and, most crucially to her story, investigating the circumstances around their murders. To study these phenomena, the author explores shows like Twin Peaks, True Detectives, and Pretty Little Liars, among others. "If you watch enough hours of murder shows," she writes, "you experience a peculiar sense of deja vu...the same murders are recounted again and again across shows." Interwoven with these analyses of pop culture is the story of the author's arrival in LA, broke, friendless, and with not much awareness of life under the sunny Californian sky. She drew many impressions of the city from the work of Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, among others, who have painted a picture of a unique, bewildering city: "I was impressed by the unnerving sense of a city that sprang up overnight and sprawled like an invasive species over the landscape." Bolin's LA story becomes exemplary of her insights about female-obsession culture, from her wacky roommates to her boyfriends to her eventual private and public writing practices. The author's voice is eerily enthralling, systematically on point, and quite funny, though at times readers may not fully understand the motives behind their laughter.
An illuminating study on the role women play in the media and in their own lives.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bolin, Alice: DEAD GIRLS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375149/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bb6f129c. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375149
Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist. 114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
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Full Text:
Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.
By Alice Bolin.
June 2018. 288p. Morrow, paper, $15.99 (9780062657145).
Media writer Bolin realized at a very young age that society loves a good dead girl. Analyzing the popularity of shows and radio programs like Twin Peaks, Serial, and Pretty Little Liars, it became abundantly clear that audiences adore a beautiful, innocent corpse. In her searing new essay collection, Bolin probes the generations-old obsession with young, tragic heroines. The topics of her exploration open broadly, dissecting the trope in television, film, and pop culture. Subject matter becomes more personal as the book progresses, meditating on Bolin's specific curiosity about California as a dead-girl breeding ground. The book's middle section chronicles Bolin's time living in the Golden State and walking the same, dehydrated earth as Sharon Tate, Patty Hearst, and any number of Joan Didion misfortu-femmes. In the final portion, Bolin ponders the role of nonfiction in eternalizing or stunting the world's toxic dead-girl fetish; the memoirist's pen, she believes, is especially mighty. Smart, thorough, and urgent, Bolin's essays are a force to be reckoned with.--Courtney Eathorne
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 14. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9066a5ad. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268017
Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession
Publishers Weekly. 265.14 (Apr. 2, 2018): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession
Alice Bolin. Morrow, $15.99 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-265714-5
Bolin's debut collection is a mixed bag of essays loosely based on female character tropes in pop culture and literature, from the "dead girls" of contemporary noir television shows to the teen witches and werewolves of film and literature. Discussing pop stars, Bolin defends Lana Del Rey's burlesque show tour and astutely deconstructs Britney Spears's oeuvre, contending that Spears's early bubble gum facade masks "a prodigious loneliness." Bolin riffs and flits through topics with tangents that don't always connect to the main theme; in one essay she begins by exploring the femme fatales in the otherwise progressive detective novels of the Scandinavian duo Maj Sjowell and Peter Wahloo, touches briefly on Pippi Longstocking, and then ponders her father's recent Asperger's diagnosis. In the collection's lengthy final essay, Bolin reevaluates her obsession with the writer Joan Didion, who admittedly inspired Bolin's move to L.A. in 2014. In this piece, she recounts her own misadventures in a new city, which leads to the realization that Didion's ethos of "glamorous desperation" may be just blind privilege. This last piece is a great personal essay--it's smart, confessional, and fully developed--and the other works in this collection pale in comparison. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 56. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555644/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9bbbb06a. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533555644
DEAD GIRLS
Lily Mclemore
BookPage. (July 2018): p23+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
DEAD GIRLS By Alice Bolin Morrow $15.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780062657145 Audio, eBook available
ESSAYS
Dead girls: They're everywhere. Television shows like "Twin Peaks" and "True Detective" are built around them, true crime shows and books investigate their deaths, and mystery novels hunt down their killers. The American public seems to be obsessed with murdered women. In her debut essay collection, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin contemplates why popular culture is fascinated by silenced women, while also exploring literature, misogyny, graveyards, the genius and tragedy of Britney Spears and the unglamorous side of the California dream.
The dead girl of popular culture is almost always viewed as a mere catalyst for others' growth. But her own life? Eh, not so important. The dead girl is merely a prop, and she can be cast as whatever the male protagonist desires--a mysterious nymphet, a sex fiend or an innocent schoolgirl--but she is almost always white, young and pretty. "The victim's body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems," Bolin writes. What does it say about our society that we are so enthralled by male violence and dead or abused women? Nothing good.
Informed by the literature of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion and others, as well as films, television shows and other pop culture ephemera, Bolin branches out, exploring toxic masculinity, myths of femininity and the American West, where, if media is to be believed, serial killers and neo-Nazis roam freely in the dense woods of the Pacific Northwest or disappear into isolated desert towns.
Bolin does not hesitate to inspect her own stigmas and beliefs--she's watched her fair share of "Dateline." Her dryly humorous, deeply researched collection is a thoughtful critique of American culture and its disparate and disturbing fixations and fears.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mclemore, Lily. "DEAD GIRLS." BookPage, July 2018, p. 23+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544601892/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3255aa2d. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544601892