Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession
Written by Alice Bolin
Narrated by Em Eldridge
3/5
()
About this audiobook
“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... 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 the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
""Bracing and blazingly smart, Alice Bolin's Dead Girls could hardly be more needed or more timely. A critical contribution to the cultural discussion of gender and genre, Los Angeles and noir, the unbearable persistence of the male gaze and the furtive potency of female rage.”
— Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of You Will Know Me
Named a most anticipated book of 2018 by Bitch Magazine
In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.
Bolin chronicles her life in Los Angeles, dissects the Noir, revisits her own coming of age, and analyzes stories of witches and werewolves, both appreciating and challenging the narratives we construct and absorb every day. Dead Girls begins by exploring the trope of dead women in fiction, and ends by interrogating the more complex dilemma of living women – both the persistent injustices they suffer and the oppression that white women help perpetrate.
Reminiscent of the piercing insight of Rebecca Solnit and the critical skill of Hilton Als, Bolin constructs a sharp, perceptive, and revelatory dialogue on the portrayal of women in media and their roles in our culture.
Alice Bolin
Alice Bolin's nonfiction has appeared in many publications including ELLE, the Awl, the LA Review of Books, Salon, VICE's Broadly, The Paris Review Daily, and The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Memphis. alicebolin.com Twitter: @alicebolin
Related to Dead Girls
Related audiobooks
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sex Object: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/590s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Consent: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nothing Will Be Different: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the Land of Men: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unbecoming: A Memoir of Disobedience Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Craigslist Confessional: A Collection of Secrets from Anonymous Strangers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5White Magic: Essays Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I Hate Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girls on Film: Lessons From a Life of Watching Women in Movies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unwifeable: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No One Tells You This: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Weird but Normal: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tornado Weather: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Night Rooms Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Criticism For You
Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51984 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Catcher in the Rye Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fahrenheit 451 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thalia Book Club: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Celebration Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lord of the Flies Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover: Key Takeaways, Summary & Analysis Included Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shakespeare Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meet Me in the Margins Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Origins of The Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bad Feminist: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Common Sense Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5To Kill a Mockingbird Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Outsiders Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thalia Book Club: Amor Towles A Gentleman in Moscow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Dead Girls
77 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I received this book for free as part of an Instagram tour (TLC Book Tours specifically) I did to promote the book.Despite the title, this isn’t really a book about dead girls. It’s more a book about girls in pop culture, but also a book about the author’s experiences in LA. However, even that doesn’t seem to adequately describe this book. It’s kind of just a collection of essays that are very loosely connected. Basically, I felt a bit confused by this collection. The essays themselves were sometimes very interesting, but there just wasn’t a strong enough theme to connect them all together. Also, some of the essays themselves were a little disjointed. For example, “The Daughter as Detective,” started out as an essay about a book series her dad liked, then ended up discussing whether her father could possibly have Asperger’s syndrome. Not at all where I thought it was going to go. I did like some of the essays, like “Lonely Heart” which explores Britney Spears. I was also happy to see Lana Del Rey mentioned, since she alludes to the dead girl trope a lot in her music. However, I wish the book went deeper into her. The 3 page analysis of her was not sufficient. Lastly, the final essay, “Accomplices,” was a mess. I was ready to give this book 3 stars and then I read this essay and had to drop it to 2. I just didn’t get it. It was very long, seemed to try to cover too much, and didn’t really touch upon dead girls at all. It felt more like an afterthought. Overall, a few well-written essays can’t save this jumbled collection.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I read this for the "An Author You've Never Heard Of Before" part of my 2019 reading challenge. Not my style. The beginning where she's comparing the use of women in pop culture was ok, after that it felt like it dissolved into her biography of moving to LA and the books she's read.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I received this book for free as part of an Instagram tour (TLC Book Tours specifically) I did to promote the book.Despite the title, this isn’t really a book about dead girls. It’s more a book about girls in pop culture, but also a book about the author’s experiences in LA. However, even that doesn’t seem to adequately describe this book. It’s kind of just a collection of essays that are very loosely connected. Basically, I felt a bit confused by this collection. The essays themselves were sometimes very interesting, but there just wasn’t a strong enough theme to connect them all together. Also, some of the essays themselves were a little disjointed. For example, “The Daughter as Detective,” started out as an essay about a book series her dad liked, then ended up discussing whether her father could possibly have Asperger’s syndrome. Not at all where I thought it was going to go. I did like some of the essays, like “Lonely Heart” which explores Britney Spears. I was also happy to see Lana Del Rey mentioned, since she alludes to the dead girl trope a lot in her music. However, I wish the book went deeper into her. The 3 page analysis of her was not sufficient. Lastly, the final essay, “Accomplices,” was a mess. I was ready to give this book 3 stars and then I read this essay and had to drop it to 2. I just didn’t get it. It was very long, seemed to try to cover too much, and didn’t really touch upon dead girls at all. It felt more like an afterthought. Overall, a few well-written essays can’t save this jumbled collection.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This is one of those set situations where if you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all. But, I will say that this was definitely well done in the marketing teams end, because I wouldn’t have read this if it wasn’t advertised as a book about the dead girl trope.
I would only recommend this if you are interested in Joan Didion, as the author is obsessed. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dead Girls is a book of essays with the subtitle Essays on Surviving an American Obsession and rarely have a title and subtitle served a book less well. Alice Bolin's book opens with an introduction about the fetishization of pretty dead young women and the first essays are fantastic, taking on the way dead girls are used in both fiction and in the media as special objects of fascination. She looks at a journalist from Spokane, WA's work about a serial killer targeting prostitutes and how that part of the world has been a perceived refuge for those who don't want to live in society, from the previously mentioned serial killer to Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge. Then she examines two Scandinavian crime series, the Martin Beck series of police procedurals, where the first novel involves a drowned woman, and the Millennium trilogy where, despite the author's avowed feminism, women are stalked, bludgeoned and tortured in increasingly violent ways. But from there, this topic is abandoned in favor of the story of the author's difficulties in transitioning to adulthood, as exemplified by her attempt to move to Los Angeles, where she wanders directionless but read a lot of Joan Didion. While the writing in this two thirds of the book is fine, the expectations raised by the title, as well as the beginning chapters don't leave a lot of room to be charmed by a series of random essays, which include everything from a survey of the cemeteries of Los Angeles to a look at literary werewolves and vampires, all peppered with references to Joan Didion's work. There was a good start at a cohesive book here. It's too bad that Bolin chose to pad it out with earlier essays instead of taking on the larger, teased at subject. I can't help but think that she was ill-served by whoever felt that this collection was publication-ready and whoever thought a misleading title would be just fine.