Dead Girls audiobook

Even though this book didn’t examine the dead girl trope as much as I wanted it to, it’s still an incredible examination of the forces that create an environment that allows the dead girl trope to thrive. She also looks at the ways white women and white feminism are both trapped by, perpetuators, and by-products of the male gaze. Honestly, it’s one of the most critically interrogative essay collections I’ve read in a while. She even points out and examines the inherent problems of the personal essay. I’ll definitely be re-reading this one and marking it up as I go.

I enjoyed reading this book. Bolin is great at personal essays and cultural criticism. She left some questions unanswered though. My review for Broadly digs into that: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/articl...

So, this is one of the few times I'm SUPER excited about a book. "Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession." There's just something about her lyrical, elegant prose, filled with popular culture references, dark humor, and truth that really resonates with me. I grew up in NW Portland in the early 1970's and the specter of forest park and all the dead girls found there was a constant reminder of my place in the world. I lived in fear, I grew up in fear, learning early to fight for myself, and to fight for my survival. This book is one of the best I've ever read. Its such a truthful book and puts a name to so many things I always knew but remained nameless. Alice Bolin is a FINE, FINE writer. I'm thrilled that she's out there, sharing her gifts with us. Read this book, it will expand your awareness of so much regarding the dangerous, shifting landscape women and girls find themselves in, every day. I absolutely loved this important and thought provoking book!

all my obsessions are, indeed, inside this book.- a collection of favorites:"the woods are shadowy, uncertain places, sympathetic to secrets, magic, transformations, and cruelty." (takes me back to an essay i wrote about cecelia condit, meditating on the geographical transcendence of the woods and how 'the psychological realms of our minds are very much linked' through art that embodies nature as a perverse homely place)"growing up with such bizarre splendor and danger implanted in me a kind of comfort with the sublime that can't have been healthy. everyone knows the american west embodies the twin ideals of beauty and terror - the intersection of the awful and the awesome - but growing up in a homely little town set against a lush and extreme landscape is freakier than that. (...) no one is watching, the uncanny countryside seems to say. anything is possible.""that women are problems to be solved, and the problem of absence, a disappearance or a murder, is generally easier to deal with than the problem of a woman's presence." (see: maggie nelson's quote about wanting to ask her professor if 'women were somehow always dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist...")"los angeles is a land of iterations, versions of versions, a swimming pool's endless refractions, a city that sprawls forever."& a description of myself: "i got too good at isolating myself, which was not intelligence but more likely the clichéd coexistence of self-hatred and self-obsession."

This is the best essay collection I have read in years. It's true, as others have noted, that the dead girl trope is addressed most directly in the first few essays, but the trope threads throughout the entire collection. The reader will think that they are reading an essay about Britney Spears, and there the dead girl is. Or the reader will think that they are reading an essay about Los Angeles, or Joan Didion, or female friendships, or reality TV, and there the dead girl is again. I love how discursive these essays are. They wander. They meander. They move. In other words, they are alive. Bolin weaves meticulous research with her own personal experiences; the essays move between her own life and the larger issues the book explores. These essays are deeply intelligent, deeply feminist. Bolin's sentences wowed me throughout the book. Here are some of my favorites, though I underlined so much more: "Heterosexual relationships are dangerous: one must balance the necessity of sex with the impossibility of trust," "[The] belief in the falsehood of narrative and the truth of fragmentation is another story we tell ourselves," "[In] True Detective and Twin Peaks, the victim's body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems."

this book knocked me out. i can't wait for everyone to read it

My favourites in this collection were definitely "Toward a Theory of a Dead Girl Show," "The Husband Did It," and "A Teen Witch's Guide to Staying Alive." I also loved Bolin's writing about general pop culture, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Twin Peaks, and Lana Del Rey, and I fell particularly in love with her musings about LA and her focus on Joan Didion. This book is somewhat falsely marketed as most of it past the first essay strays from a cultural criticism of the "dead girl" trope, although it is a topic that reoccurs from time to time throughout. I would recommend this for fans of Leslie Jamieson or Rebecca Solnit.

i gifted myself a scribd premium subscription on a whim because i like having the option to listen to audiobooks, and also on a whim, i chose dead girls as my first book of the year. i was expecting something far lighter than what i got, despite the title, and by that i mean something that wasnt going to make me so introspective. bolsonaro just took power and i really want to relax a little with some nonfiction. but im glad i chose this book regardless.at first i thought dead girls was merely a book about, well, dead girls. and to its credit, it IS about dead girls. but bolin takes you on a journey before really making all of her points. and its a journey worth going on, littered with the bodies of dead girls along the way.when i was a teenager, i used to love chuck klosterman books but as an adult he just doesnt do it for me; going back to his books and articles feels empty and stale. but dead girls hits all of those same satisfying beats--the pop culture analyses, the personal experiences, the big-city-as-character, the political commentary--but more, somehow. i never felt like bolin was smugly telling me how much better than me she was like i usually get from these kinds of personal essays, and throughout the essays there is a very strong yet natural sense of continuity. LA is not just the backdrop to these essays but a character in itself, looming ominously in the background as a present influence on every named person in the book, even other authors bolin cites. bolins borderline obsession with joan didion seems to be the catalyst for nearly every major and minor decision she makes in her life even when the writer isnt mentioned explicitly. the politics in this book are also surprisingly introspective and powerful in a way that i rarely see in books i choose at random on these audiobook rental services. suffice to say that it isnt enough to just talk about dead, white girls, and bolin is incredibly aware of that fact.overall this book fucking ruled. i wish i were in a less doom-and-gloom state of mind for this, but i think ill return to it some day if i ever get my hands on a paper copy of it.

This was one of those books that I got from the library and then maybe 30 pages in I went out and bought myself a copy. It's definitely one I will read and reread over time and write notes in. Not only did I really enjoy Bolin's discussion of dead (and living) women in our pop culture over time, but I really appreciated her personal essays about living in LA. I had a similar LA encounter and really identified with a lot of what she was saying and how she seems to have felt about the city. I knew I was going to like this collection of essays, but I was surprised by how much I really loved it overall!

Two things: 1) I loved this smart, insightful, and funny collection of essays by Alice Bolin. 2) It’s not really about what you think it’s about. I went into Dead Girls expecting a collection of essays examining our cultural obsession with violence against women as entertainment. The book’s called Dead Girls, for god’s sake. But only the first few essays really address that topic. Honestly, Bolin is more focused on Joan Didion than on the dead girl trope. I was disappointed at first, but once I let go of my expectations, I ended up deeply connecting to Bolin and her writing. Bolin is primarily interested in entertainment and how our consumption of media effects our reality. She uses the Millennium series to discuss her relationship with her father, if he’s on the Autism spectrum, and whether or not that matters. She examines how Joan Didion both led her to LA and let her down. She uses a 1962 New Wave film Cléo from 5 to 7 to investigate her struggles with hypochondria. Dead Girls is half critical analysis and half a deeply personal coming of age story. As with all essay collections, I connected with some sections of this book more than others. I struggled with some of her essays worshiping Joan Didion (haven’t read her yet. Eeeeeek) and exploring LA. On the other hand, I was absolutely obsessed with the Weird Sisters portion of Dead Girls, specifically her essays “A Teen Witch’s Guide to Staying Alive” (discussing Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle) and “Just Us Girls” (about a campy, feminist, werewolf horror movie called Ginger Snaps). I also deeply connected to her last essay, "Accomplices", which dissects her first serious relationship, growing up late, and the privilege, power, and culpability of white women. Dead Girls is cultural criticism that is both academic and intimate. At times, I felt like I was learning so much. Other times, I felt like I was talking shit with my best friend. It was the perfect balance. I loved Dead Girls and will be keeping my eye out for more works from Bolin.

Underscoring the importance of this book--when you search for it on Goodreads, about a thousand books with Dead Girl in the title come up. The first few essays, about the patriarchy and what our obsession with dead women actually means about our culture, are brilliant. The rest of the book is really fine.Well worth the read, especially if you are a writer working in the murder area.

This collection of essays seems slightly mis-titled, since only the first one really deals with the “dead girl” trope (think Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks”) in any depth. But the others are just as fascinating and well-written, combining personal experience with a wide range of pop culture (and regular culture) touchstones to create a very specific account of how growing self-awareness mixes with the art we choose, and the places we live. This specificity allows the reader to discover the parallels in their own lives, and gives resonance where a more “universal” approach would feel false.

As a fan of personal essays, especially ones about our relationships with popular culture, I LOVED this. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea but it's for sure mine.The title is a little misleading, and Bolin addresses that on the first page: "This is a book about books. To try that again, it is a book about my fatal flaw: that I insist on learning everything from books. I find myself wanting to apologize for my book's title, which, in addition to embarrassingly taking part in an ubiquitous publishing trend by including the word girls, seems to evince a lurid and cutesy complicity in the very brutality it critiques."So if you're picking this up in search of a true crime-focused narrative, you'll be disappointed. I'm ambivalent about true crime so I was actually glad that it wasn't entirely focused on that. It's more about Joan Didion and Los Angeles but mostly about coming of age as a woman in a society that maybe prefers the titular dead girls. I love Bolin's writing style and found a lot to relate to here.

if someone was to package all the things i cared about in 2014, this book is it. ruminations on Joan Didion, Lana del Rey, Rachel Kushner, Britney Spears, Southern California, pop culture criticism...this book has it all. please read.

I absolutely loved this collection of essays by Alice Bolin.There are thirteen essays, all of them very well written, some of them very thoughtful. The final piece is much longer and really a tribute to the author's influence of Joan Didion and perhaps James Baldwin or perhaps even more, her journey to LA where she lived for a bit.My favorites were:Toward a Theory of a Dead Girl ShowThe Husband Did ItThe Daughter as DetectiveThere ThereA Teen Witch's Guide to Staying AliveAnd So It isJust Us GirlsThese were all really good essays that spoke to Dead and Lost Girls themes, Both Theory of a Dead Girl Show and The Husband Did It are directly connected to the idea of women and crimes. (As is And So It is, The Daughter as Detective and There, There). There is a total obsession in the media and books with girls that are dead, lost, betrayed, oppressed, sexualized, and of course, objectified. All of these essays really connect various themes on that dead, lost trope, from metaphors found in Twin Peaks to the extreme Pretty Little Liars, to the antics in Gone Girl. Teenagers are bred on these stories, think Veronica Mars, another Dead Girl Show, that is explored in the essay The Daughter as Detective. We can't seem to escape Dead Girls, literal or metaphorical ones. And I suppose that is all right, but how is all this really conceived and how is it managed and what does it mean. Bolin attempts to explain but sometimes she raises more questions, which is certainly all right with me, since these essays do try to put some kind of 'finger' on the violence that Americans are so obsessed with in all forms of art/media.This was all good, but Bolin takes it one step more when she gets to Part 3: Weird Girls, which is my favorite section, so much so that I want to review everything mentioned in it. A Witch's Guide to Staying Alive is about two of my favorite novels, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and Beloved by Toni Morrison. (with dips into White is For Witching and Sula.) All these girls are sort of dead if not lost to life in many ways. But why? They are not like the others in the traditional sense. They are not victims to personal murders or escapades. This is a social contract that is broken with humanity. And it's feminism and agency that is at stake.Two more really good essays were And So It was, about a group of real life girls who did a reality TV show only to later become a criminal. We are talking about Pretty Wild to Coppola's Bling Ring. I found this one truly disturbing and I want to think about it some more. These is the power of modern reality TV, which reflects our culture and where it is going, especially in terms of social media that Bolin can't or won't address yet.The other one that I really found thoughtful was Just Us Girls, a nice piece on Ginger Snaps and the dangers of obsession. Ginger Snaps is about two girls who become werewolves. I think there are three movies now, but the first was Ginger Snaps and I thought it was provoking in all kinds of ways. Bolin easily taps into its core dilemmas, the problem of adolescent girls and what that means.I'd like to write a really good essay about Bolin's essays later on. I imagine it would take me a month to organize my thoughts and write the piece. Something for me to look forward to.HIGHLY RECOMMENDED TO ALL. ESPECIALLY YOUNG GIRLS