Dead Girls

by Alice Bolin

  If it isn’t already obvious, most of my questions here are questions of conscience: How can I use the personal essay, instead of letting it use me? When I look at James Baldwin, one of the most deserving heroes of the form, I see a portrait of a true political artist, and all the difficulty that goes along with that position. No Name in the Street is the account of writing interrupted over and over again: he is called away from novels and screenplays by the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. He marches on Washington and fund-raises for the Black Panthers. And in the end, it was a book “much delayed by trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair.” But he holds on to what art can do that politics can’t: remind us that “the people are one mystery and that the person is another.”

  Unexpectedly, in the notes section of her book On Immunity, Eula Biss (author of another memorable Goodbye to All That, from her first collection, Notes from No Man’s Land), writes a short meditation on the ambiguous place of the personal essayist:

  as a poet who writes in prose, or a prose writer informed by poetry, I have often found myself confronted with the question of belonging. The problem has not been finding a place where I belong . . . but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere. To this end, I have tried to heed Alice Walker’s lines “Be nobody’s darling; / Be an outcast.” The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.

  The problem is that self-appointed outcasts like Didion, who looked at the most charismatic movements of her day with skepticism, have become everybody’s darling. Grizzuti Harrison says snidely of Didion that “many male critics find her adorable,” but this isn’t exactly Didion’s fault. It’s a case where celebrity has transformed an odd, prickly artist into a poster girl.

  Being a darling is tempting, which is why I abided so long in an extended adolescence I didn’t deserve and that didn’t do me much good. C and I had a codependent relationship where I lolled around his house like an infant, and he resented me for it; then he bought everything for me, and I resented him for that. “You’re saying he’s the type who is into younger women?” the narrator of The Flamethrowers asks her friend about Sandro. “Sweetheart, that’s all men,” her friend replies. But C, who was four years older than me, hinted that he would rather date an older woman, saying when he turned thirty that women in their thirties would finally take him seriously. I was understandably offended. But I should have taken it as a clue that being a girl would not serve me forever.

  If it ever served. In Chelsea Girls, a girl Eileen knows as a teenager goes on a beach trip with friends. She is lying by the pool passed out drunk when all the boys ejaculate on her face. “She was disgusting,” the girl who invited her says. Another girl “had been gang raped one night and never seen again.” Later in the book, Eileen recounts an experience she had at a beach house when she was eighteen. She was so drunk she remembers nothing except “the rhythm of many guys . . . I seem to remember all of them in there at once but that may have been a blur and then precisely Dave sitting down . . . saying you are disgusting, you are a slut.” “Rape was the first sex I ever heard of,” she says. Eileen’s friend, the younger sister of one of her rapists, did nothing to protect her, saying that she thought Eileen liked it.

  That is precisely the problem with white girlhood as a consolation prize from the patriarchy: it can offer adoration and protection, but it’s every girl for herself. Women artists are wise to reject it, since our culture celebrates boy geniuses, but not many girl geniuses. One of the few is Taylor Swift, who has somehow stretched her public coming-of-age from her teens to her late twenties. I used to listen to her sad-sack songs on the bus in L.A. and actually cry. In the spring, when I was more than a little reluctant to move in with C, he bought us tickets to an end-of-summer Taylor Swift concert at the Staples Center that cost more than a thousand dollars. I begged him not to, but he did, and it was the perfect painful coda to our relationship.

  At the end of my school year, when I knew I had to break up with C, I went to my parents’ house in Nebraska for two weeks to think it over. I was a wreck with guilt and anxiety, having never had a conversation as consequential as a breakup. As I agonized to my mom, my younger brother told me, kindly, that my situation was simpler than it seemed. “You hear a lot of people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I dated that person for a year when I lived in L.A. or wherever,’” he said. The only way to grow up is to realize that the little tragedies that shock and devastate you are actually universal and inevitable. You are not going to learn that by listening to Taylor Swift or reading Joan Didion, not that I intend to stop doing either. I wish this insight on people before they turn twenty-five, but it’s better late than never.

  I broke up with C on a Tuesday. At the end of the week I would go to Montana to lick my wounds for the summer before returning to the boarding school for work in the fall. For the rest of the week after the breakup, we had sweet, rueful dates, like going to the Americana in Glendale to eat dumplings and see an animated movie about anthropomorphic feelings. I could not have invented a more Los Angeles hipster destination for our very last date: a monthly invite-only farm-to-table pop-up in Santa Monica, several courses served on mismatched shabby chic wedding china. I accidentally wore the same thing I wore on our first date, because I wore it all the time, a ratty floral skirt I bought at Target when I was twenty. When we got there, groups of women were stepping from their Ubers in glittery cocktail attire. I had never exactly seen it before: how little I even looked like I belonged in C’s world, how badly I had been playing my part the whole time. And I had never felt so acutely how little the perks of his Los Angeles were worth it.

  In Oh, Never Mind, Choi writes that her last days in New York “were all about spending my not-very-much money on not being there. I’m all about that JOMO life: the joy of missing out.” I have had a perverse version of JOMO my whole life, which is why I moved to Los Angeles and not New York, preferring to be stranded in a sun-bleached freeway labyrinth than to thrive in a literary hub where I could meet other people like me and most things are easily accessible by train. On our last date, I looked over the balcony at some Dumpsters and thought with bright relief about all I would be missing out on that summer. The day I left Los Angeles I steered my overloaded car north toward the desert, and I felt like myself, acting alone.

  Acknowledgments

  Versions of some of these essays have appeared elsewhere, many in different form. Thank you to my editors at the Awl, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Toast, Broadly, The Believer, and This Recording for giving those pieces their first homes.

  Thank you to my genius editor, Chloe Moffett, and the entire team at Morrow/HarperCollins. You made this book ten times better. Thank you to my acquiring editor, Marguerite Weisman, for making my dream come true—I will always be grateful. Thank you to my perfect agent, Monika Woods, who believed I was writing a book long before I did.

  Thank you to the Department of Creative Writing at the University of Montana and the Montana MaFiA, without whose nepotism I would not be where I am today. Thank you to my writing professors at the University of Nebraska and the University of Montana, especially Rebecca Bednarz, Brian Blanchfield, Prageeta Sharma, Peter Richards, Kevin Canty, and Debra Magpie Earling.

  Thank you to the Creative Writing department at Idyllwild Arts Academy and my dear colleagues Kim Henderson and Abbie Bosworth for giving me the time and support to write much of this book. Thank you to all my students at Idyllwild Arts Academy and the University of Memphis for your joy and brilliance.

  To my many wonderful friends, colleagues, and mentors, especially Emily Jones, Zoey Farber, Emma Törzs, Virginia Zech, Andrew Martin, Breanne Reiss, Ed Skoog, and J. Robert Lennon, for your fellowship, encouragement, and advice, I thank you.

  To my family, especially Tim Stuart, Fred Stuart, Willo Stuart, and Anderson Stuart, my love and thanks always. Thank you to Dan Hornsby for l
oving and believing in me, and for being my smartest and most helpful reader. To Mary Bolin, Bob Bolin, Tom Bolin, Charlie Bolin, and LaVon Crosby—I love you, and this book is for you.

  About the Author

  ALICE BOLIN’s nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including Elle, the Awl, the Los Angeles 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.

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  Phenomenal Praise for Dead Girls

  “Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence. Bolin deftly lays our TV habits and pleasure reading and musical tastes in front of us, daring us to look closer. 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.”

  —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

  “I loved this book with reckless abandon. Alice Bolin tracks our societal fixation with violence against young women through an astonishing variety of cultural landscapes. She’s a cultural critic, a grown-up girl, and, often, an enthusiastic fan of the narratives she’s pulling apart, and her ability to move seamlessly between these perspectives makes for an irresistible read. It’s wise and wonderful and I plan to press it on everyone I know.”

  —Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire

  “[An] engrossing debut collection of essays. . . . The author’s voice is eerily enthralling, systematically on point, and quite funny. . . . An illuminating study on the role women play in the media and in their own lives.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “In her searing new essay collection, Bolin probes the generations-old obsession with young, tragic heroines. . . . Smart, thorough, and urgent, Bolin’s essays are a force to be reckoned with.”

  —Booklist

  “A smart, incisive book about true crime and crime fiction tropes, loneliness, Los Angeles, and literature. I will be thinking about this collection for a long while.”

  —Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita

  “I loved reading Dead Girls. I knew that I was already dead, in a way, and I knew that so many of my friends and the people I saw on TV were buried here with me, but until Alice Bolin illuminated the corners of this cemetery, I didn’t see the dazzling light around us. Her potent voice and nimble intertwining of the personal and the cultural form an incantation strong enough for a resurrection.”

  —Elissa Washuta, author of Starvation Mode

  “With this book, Alice Bolin has singlehandedly rekindled my affection for criticism-as-memoir, offering a wry, supremely intelligent reinvention of the genre. Dead Girls is about living in, and through, culture; about the inseparability of art and life; about the lies we tell ourselves and other people, and the lies we love to be told. And it’s just so, so funny and sad and big-hearted. I love this writer’s every word and I look forward to reading her for the rest of my life.”

  —J. Robert Lennon, author of Broken River

  “My copy of Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls is a thick flutter of dog-eared pages and underlined sentences. It made me think about what I’ve read, and what I’ve written, and what I’ve experienced in a fresh and challenging way.”

  —Emily Winslow, author of Jane Doe January

  Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls is a vivid and compelling collection challenging how we read and watch young women, alive and otherwise. Her sharp takes on the crime fiction of screen and page bleed into unnerving yet compelling visions of sisterhood and the American West. Dead Girls is a compulsively readable and thoroughly enjoyable book, offering honesty and insight about the threats women face and perpetuate as we come of age.”

  —Rachel McCarthy James, coauthor of The Man from the Train

  “From Britney Spears to Law & Order, Alice Bolin sheds new light on the beautiful and strange mosaic of our cultural mythology. In effusive and incisive prose, Bolin examines our culture and finds beauty and truth in the tangled mess of it all. Both playful and thoughtful, urgent and timeless, this book is a riveting read that both journeys through our cultural consciousness and reckons with it.”

  —Lyz Lenz, managing editor of The Rumpus

  “Intimate and intelligent, meditative and kinetic, these essays brim with insights on how to make a life in a world that was not made for you to star in.”

  —Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love

  Copyright

  Some essays in this collection have been previously published.

  dead girls. Copyright © 2018 by Alice Bolin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  first edition

  Cover design by Michelle Willems

  Cover photograph © plainpicture/miguel sobreira

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Digital Edition JUNE 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-265716-9

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-265714-5

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