Sady Doyle

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year “Smart, funny, and fearless.” —THE BOSTON GLOBE Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. Maybe they are. And maybe that’s a good thing.... Sady Doyle, hailed as “smart, funny and fearless” by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula’s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, starving herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, dreaming her dead child back to life. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive. “Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture; Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.”—Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once

Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power

Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

She s everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck. She s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying, crack is whack, and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself. From Mary Wollstonecraft who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" to Charlotte Bronte, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle s"Trainwreck"dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to behave. Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Sady Doyle s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck."

The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear and Why

Trainwreck

"I'm so many people. They shock me sometimes. I wish I was just me!" --Marilyn Monroe Nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains an icon whom everyone loves but no one really knows. The conversations gathered here--spanning her emergence on the Hollywood scene to just days before her death at age 36--show Monroe at her sharpest and most insightful on the thorny topics of ambition, fame, femininity, desire, and more. Together with an introduction by Sady Doyle, these pieces reveal yet another Marilyn: not the tragic heroine she's become in the popular imagination, but a righteously and justifiably angry figure breaking free of the limitations the world forced on her.

Sady Doyle

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