Name: Lindy's review of Dead Girls by Alice Bolin
Item: Dead Girls
Rating: 3
Author: Lindy

Alice Bolin

“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book.” — 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.” — Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of You Will Know Me Best of summer 2018 - included on best-of lists by Bitch Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, The Millions, Esquire, Refinery29, Nylon, PopSugar, The Chicago Tribune, Book Riot, and CrimeReads 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.

Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

Dead Girls

Bailley Leppert

“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.

Lindy

The phrase "[moving to Los Angeles] is the only interesting thing I have ever done" appears twice in this book: once in the introduction, and once to introduce the final essay. From this one can immediately discern the type of person Alice Bolin is, or at least presents herself to be, within the pages; she is a creative who isn't all that creative. In the last essay, Bolin recognizes that the conflict arising from the dissonance between her self-concept and the reality of her day-to-day life is not unique to her, that it is something that everyone has to contend with and that she is not one of the most interesting people in the world, and characterizes this recognition as the moment she reached maturity. Unfortunately (imo), most of the essays in the book were penned prior to this time, so there's this patently late adolescent ennui hovering about. The "girls" of the title is more appropriate than I initially assumed.

The parts about true crime were pretty good. The parts about pop music were lousy. The parts about Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, et al. were whatever. "Just Us Girls," an ode to the importance of teenage female friendships, was a painful reminder that heterosexual teenage girls may well have lived on an entirely different planet.

Alexa M

it did not give what it was supposed to have gave...
i went into this book thinking i was going to read about the dehumanization of women as a form of entertainment in our culture and instead got... not that. this is half seemingly random stories about the author's own life and half intricate dives into the plots of various forms of media paired with extremely shallow commentary. i'm just really really confused as to what i read to be completely honest.

Chandler Primak

Two essays on our obsession with dead girls, the rest were pieces of an unrelated memoir. She made some good points in the chapters that actually discussed the prevalence of female murder victims but once the author wrote a whole essay about her hypochondria.. I was tired of this creative nonfiction and probably wouldn’t recommend it.

Jill Swan

I did not care for this book. This collection of essays was so loosely curated, almost none of them had any relation to the obsession with Dead Girls, as the title and subtitle proclaimed. Most of these essays were about how the author wanted to be Joan Didion; the only time I liked the author was when she admitted for years all of her essays started with her moving to Los Angeles because it was the only brave or interesting thing she had ever done. I thought this would be a study about a cultural phenomenon, the way Trainwreck by Sady Doyle was, but it couldn’t have been farther from it. A few times I almost gave up on it, but I am stubborn, and now that I’ve finished it, I’m not sure it was worth it. Even as a collection of essays about a girl trying to find herself, I didn’t find it compelling in the least. My advice: read something. else.

Jessica 

Review also found here at Booked J. 

Alice Bolin's offering of Dead Girls is a solid debut. It's surely an interesting and complex read that analyzes the ever-appearing dead girl trope. Yet, it's also something I am of two minds about--which has been happening fairly often for me this year. You know when you read something and you're partly like, "Yeah. I liked this a bit." and still a bit, "But I kind of didn't like this, either."and it's just all very... puzzling? That's how I felt when finishing Dead Girls.

From an academic standpoint, every essay reads exactly as Bolin meant for it to. Highly intelligent and thought-provoking, Dead Girls really and truly gives some great insight to the title topic. Yet, the flow of each essay seemed almost a bit misplaced--and the collection itself felt quite like it wasn't marketed quite like it should have been. As someone who seemingly questions everything, I really enjoyed the criticism that Bolin brings forward on who we are as a society and what we give the most attention and coverage to.

So to a degree, I very much so appreciated the manner in which she tackled the topics at hand. Bolin is incapable of holding back during this and I truly respect that, even in the moments where I found myself scoffing. Which is less of an insult, and more of a symbol that I can relate to Bolin's thought process in many moments.

Further, I felt like the focus was less on the title subject and more varying than you'd expect. This is not merely a book analyzing the media, and general public's, love of dead girls--there's just way more at play in each essay. And while sometimes this was deeply fitting in what she discussed, other times it felt like there was just way too much--and oddly not enough. 

I will say that I did enjoy reading these essays. And that's, really, all I can say.

Bailley Leppert &
Dead Girls by Alice Bolin

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Bailley Leppert &Dead Girls by Alice Bolin

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Bailley Leppert &
Dead Girls by Alice Bolin