About the book…
A collection of poignant, perceptive essays that expertly blends the personal and political in an exploration of American culture through the lens of our obsession with dead women.
In her debut collection, Alice Bolin turns a critical eye to literature and pop culture, the way media consumption reflects American society, and her own place within it. From essays on Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, Bolin illuminates our widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster a man’s story.
From chronicling life in Los Angeles to dissecting the “Dead Girl Show” to analyzing literary witches and werewolves, this collection challenges the narratives we create and tell ourselves, delving into the hazards of toxic masculinity and those of white womanhood. Beginning with the problem of dead women in fiction, it expands to the larger problems of living women—both the persistent injustices they suffer and the oppression that white women help perpetrate.
Sharp, incisive, and revelatory, Dead Girls is a much-needed dialogue on women’s role in the media and in our culture.
This is part memoir, part road trip and part examination of the cultural trope of the ‘dead white girl’.
Using the juxtaposition of selected books, movies, t.v shows and her own white girl status, Alice Bolin delves into her personal journey of how she became obsessed with it.
It is a feminist call to not merely accept this trope, this obsession for what it is. For example, when examining ‘‘Twin Peaks’‘, a series I have always rated very highly and watched from the initial screening,she turns my preconceptions on its head.
How could I never have noticed that Laura palmer takes a backseat in her own murder?
She is simultaneously blamed for bringing her death upon herself, and also for hurting the image of the picture postcard American every-town.
Even in death the girls and/or women are removed as the murderer( or hunt for the murderer)takes centre stage.
How many victims of Ted Bundy could one name?? But everyone knows he used his looks and his guile to get to indulge the most twisted of kicks and his place in popular culture is bordering on reverential.
Even Sharon Tate, arguably the most famous 20th century dead white girl, has become an after the fact side line to the ‘Manson Murders’. She is further dug up and revived as one of Tarantino’s fetishes in ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’
These essays were intriguing, fascinating and illuminating all at the same time. I have yet to hold a paper copy in my hands, I could only listen on Audible , read by the author herself.
I highly recommend this collection of essays, and will 100% be putting Alice Bolin on my ‘got to read’ list.
About the author…
Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls, a collection of essays about crime, gender, and the American West.
Her criticism, personal essays, and journalism have appeared in publications including Elle, Salon, Racked, The Awl, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review online, and The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog.
Her poems have been published in Guernica, Washington Square, Blackbird, and Ninth Letter, among many other journals.
She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Memphis
Links-https://alicebolin.com/
Author
bridgeman.lenny@gmail.com