sophielaura1's review against another edition
1.0
1 star is being generous. God, where do is start. Firstly, the title of the is COMPLETELY misleading. It was nothing alike what the book suggested and more of a memoir style book, of a relatively boring girl who lived in LA for a few months. Anytime we did begin to delve in to the topic of ‘dead girls’ in which the author would use a (semi) popular tv show, movie or book etc, she would change her mind about what kind of pop culture reference she wanted to use and then switch back and forth and back and forth. Like she couldn’t keep her mind on track. To be honest, I initially thought that I wasn’t smart enough to read this book, because I was struggling with some of the references etc, but it turns out that it wasn’t a me thing after reading reviews with similar opinions and thoughts. The best way I could describe the writing in this book is that it was like reading words instead of sentences. Anyway, I’ll definitely start reading more reviews before auto-buying books that I think have interesting premises. ONE VERY GENEROUS STAR!!
600bars's review
2.0
I can’t remember why I added this to-read in 2018, but it’s definitely a topic I am interested in. And I was glad I waited to read it til now, because there were many things in it that I wouldn’t have known about had I read it back then . There is a long essay on Twin Peaks vs True Detective, which I have a lot to say about, and I didn’t watch either of those until last year. So I’m glad it took me so long to get to because otherwise I would’ve been confused. I probably should have waited til I read some more Joan Didion because that’s what 80% of this book is about contrary to what you’d expect from the title. I kept wishing that Bolin herself had waited to write this book because I could think of so many things that were on theme that didn’t exist at the time! There are 3 topics in particular: the Moscow, Idaho murder of 4 college students earlier this year, the murder of Gabby Patito, and Ethel Motherfuckin Cain. There was a little bit about Lana in here, imagine what Bolin could do if she had listened to the song Strangers by Ethel!
Bolin is from Moscow, Idaho, and one of the better essays in here concerns her small town and how it ties into the theme. I was just like, damn, one of the biggest true crime news stories this past year was about the brutal killing of 4 college students, 3 of which were girls, in her small town of Moscow Idaho! It would fit so well with this essay it’s insane. I actually checked her twitter to see if she had written anything about it and she did tweet “resisting the urge to use the death of 4 girls in moscow idaho to sell my book about murders in moscow idaho”.
The first section of the book stays on theme, even though there are some odd bits like the essay where she is analyzing the Millenium trilogy but the essay concludes with “and that's why I think my dad is Autistic”. Lmfao. But the latter 2/3rds of the book are just Bolin being like “I moved to LA because I wanted to be like Joan Didion and I realized that in order to be a good writer you need to be an interesting person but I never did anything daring in my life so I moved to LA so here’s a bunch of essays about how it went when I moved to LA but it’s not that interesting and I know it and I keep apologizing for it”. I honestly got embarrassed for her a little bit, and part of that is because she herself is self conscious about being cliche and unoriginal, like she is aware that she’s following in the literary footsteps of people like Didion but times have changed and the field is saturated.
The odd thing is, despite claiming to have no interesting life experience, Bolin dropped tons of fascinating tidbits about her childhood and background– her childhood home sounded like an earthship, I’m interested in small town Idaho given its propensity to host situations like the Randy Weaver shootout or the family from Educated (which she does cover in the essay I liked), and she went to college when she was 16 and graduated at 19. But as for that last one, she says deeply embarrassing things like when she quotes a text message from her bf that says ”do you think your superior intelligence will doom you to be forever alone?”, and she responds “My answer is sort of obviously yes” apparently without irony. Bolin is open about the fact that she thought all of her coworkers at a restaurant were not people with hopes and dreams like her, and she felt better than them because she was a ~writer~. Her larger point made sense, that when you’re working a shitty job on your way to your dreams it can be easier to get through by telling yourself that this isn’t your real life, this is just temporary, you’re not A Waitress like those other losers, you’re a Writer (who waits tables to get by). She then finally realizes that most of her coworkers have side gigs as well, and almost none of them intended for this to be their true career. But even if they had, would they still not be considered people in Bolin’s eyes? To a certain extent I think everyone has a wake up call where they’re served a slice of humble pie and must realize that everyone around you also has interiority, but you should realize that much earlier in life than 25 lol. I guess props for admitting that?
The book is written in 2018, and everything from the Trump years is slightly poisoned and embarrassing to read now, so I have to cut her a little slack because we are too recent from that time period to look at it with nostalgia, so it feels dated. Bolin acknowledges over and over again that she is a white woman and she knows that a large part of the dead white woman tripe is the whiteness of said woman. But sometimes I wished that rather than simply acknowledging this fact and apologizing for being white, she had highlighted a case wherein a woman of color went missing or died, even a fictional character, and contrasted that case. Rachel Aviv, also a white girl, wrote a fantastic essay collection last year about mental illness, and she includes memoir-y bits about her own story, but she also included such a wide range of subjects which gave the reader a way deeper understanding and contemplation of the ways in which race and class impact one’s experience with severe mental illness. It was way more impactful to hear those other stories than if she had just written about her own experience with a ton of guilt ridden disclaimers about how she knows she’s privileged blah blah blah.
I lost my juice of writing this review because I uncharacteristically returned the book before reviewing it and I then read I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai which raised some similar questions/themes about true crime and the Dead Girl Phenomena. I definitely mentally glossed over much of the essays about Joan Didion, partially because I haven’t read any of her work besides Year of Magical Thinking but also because I was just not that interested. Generally when you read criticism you should be able to still get something out of it even if you haven’t read/watched the thing being critiqued. But she did cover some cultural detritus that I really love like Gone Girl, Britney Spears, The Millenium Trilogy (I really need to reread that series because when I read it I was too young to understand anything about corruption, I just thought Lisbeth Salander was really cool. I do recall noting that Blomkvist had sex with literally every single woman that he came across in the book regardless of if it made sense to do so.)
I read the Britney Rolling Stone profile that Bolin mentions, and then later that day I listened to the song Lucky and literally burst into tears omg. Britney was so formative for me– when I was a kid I was a dork/nerd and my hero fixations were historical figures like Amelia Earheart or Sadako the girl who died from cancer in the atomic bombs. Then one day when I was probably 7 or 8 my uncle’s gf’s daughter who was slightly older than me showed me something that would change my life. It was Lucky by Britney Spears and that moment made me realize there was an entire world I was unaware of and I truly feel it was a fork in the road moment for me that initiated me into womanhood like I am being dramatic but I’m so serious… Plus the plight of Britney Spears really does depress me in the same way I feel about Amy Whinehouse. Thinking of Britney as a Living Dead Girl makes me so sad and I don’t think we will know the actual truth about her life for a very long time!
The first essay in this collection she’s spitting on a topic I am passionate about: the fact that True Detective is an inferior child of Twin Peaks. Sorry the rest of this paragraph is a almost completely incoherent run on sentence about my thoughts on these two shows where none of the ideas are fully formed & they don’t really have anything to do with this book Tbh Bolin is not that generous toward Twin Peak’s treatment of Laura Palmer, which I disagree with because in some ways Laura Palmer is the stereotypical dead girl the beautiful popular blonde but I feel that as the series progresses we do get a full fleshed out sense of who she was in all her complexity, and there is no mention of Fire Walk With Me or the Return which I believe was out by the time this book came out. I’m definitely a bigger fan of Twin Peaks than she is (not as in I’m a more dedicated fan, I literally mean I like it more than she appears to, I think it’s a genius portrayal of the darkness of America and of True Evil), but she and I are on the same page about True Detective. Bolin is simultaneously “annoyed and inspired by the heavy-handedness of its entire mission”. Matthew Mcconahey and Woody Harrelson put on excellent performances, and it’s a technically well-made show, and very entertaining. But I really felt it was lacking something important regarding femininity. The women in the show are basically window dressing from the wives/mistresses, the dead daughter as Rust Cohle’s backstory padding, and the dead girls that they are investigating/rescuing are not REAL girls, they are the idea of girls in like a fascist “protect women and children” abstract concept. Both shows are suffused with the supernatural and the hauntedness of the land around them, land that the main characters know on a subconscious level they should not be on. I wish Rust Cohle didn’t have that silly backstory so you have plausible deniability that he’s hallucinating things and fuck that side track ass episode where there’s the raid and the motorcycle gang omg. I’m ranting and none of this is consequential or important but I just think True Detective is lacking the feminine in a way that other similar works like Twin Peaks or From Hell have, which is hard to articulate because i don’t think either of those works would pass the bechdel test either I’m not saying that it’s not a feminist enough portrayal of women or whatever, it’s not merely the depth of female characters, that’s not what I’m talking about. All 3 of these stories are about deep evil verging on the supernatural, ritual sacrifice of women, corruption at every level of power, and all are told from the perspective of a detective on the case. But Twin Peaks and From Hell get into a deep dark terror of divine proportions, like a horror of femininity on a primal level and the resultant denigration of women. Laura Palmer is a symbol too in addition to being a fleshed out character, she is the terrain on which a huge good vs evil battle is being waged but it feels like she’s a lightning rod for something so large it’s Lovecraftian, it’s bigger and deeper and older than her and the town. The girls in TD are faceless victims who need to be protected by Rust and Woody Harrelson, and neither of them care about women beyond them being like little lambs to protect to make themselves feel big and strong!! Cosmic horror is also very present in TD and that aspect is well done, it’s just missing the divine dark feminine tiamat etc. I had to look up the name of the girl killed in TD- Dora Lange– but no one who watches Twin Peaks will forget Laura Palmer! The most compelling aspect of the show is the complex relationship between the two detectives, which is fine. It did a great job on that front, and like I said I don’t think it’s a bad show I just have this grating problem with it that I have struggled to get to the bottom of and I would probably need to rewatch both TD and Twin Peaks to articulate what it is, this sounds like i merely liked Twin Peaks more which I did but I did in fact have a good time watching true detective, I like quality HBO shows as much as the next guy. I just feel like there was something that TD didn’t understand & it's for the Boys (™) ¬ for the girlies in a way that irritates me . TD is giving place beyond the pines and a man explaining nietzsche and Twin Peaks is giving lana del rey & has something for everyone . Again all 3 of these pieces of media are about the slaughter of sex workers TD treatment of women just annoys me in particular, Twin Peaks and From Hell are ABOUT misogyny (among other things) but TD is too misogynist itself to say anything profound on the topic
More than anything this book suffered from being marketed as one thing when it was actually another. More essays on the presented theme should’ve been here, and then a separate book of Joan Didion style personal essays
Bolin is from Moscow, Idaho, and one of the better essays in here concerns her small town and how it ties into the theme. I was just like, damn, one of the biggest true crime news stories this past year was about the brutal killing of 4 college students, 3 of which were girls, in her small town of Moscow Idaho! It would fit so well with this essay it’s insane. I actually checked her twitter to see if she had written anything about it and she did tweet “resisting the urge to use the death of 4 girls in moscow idaho to sell my book about murders in moscow idaho”.
The first section of the book stays on theme, even though there are some odd bits like the essay where she is analyzing the Millenium trilogy but the essay concludes with “and that's why I think my dad is Autistic”. Lmfao. But the latter 2/3rds of the book are just Bolin being like “I moved to LA because I wanted to be like Joan Didion and I realized that in order to be a good writer you need to be an interesting person but I never did anything daring in my life so I moved to LA so here’s a bunch of essays about how it went when I moved to LA but it’s not that interesting and I know it and I keep apologizing for it”. I honestly got embarrassed for her a little bit, and part of that is because she herself is self conscious about being cliche and unoriginal, like she is aware that she’s following in the literary footsteps of people like Didion but times have changed and the field is saturated.
The odd thing is, despite claiming to have no interesting life experience, Bolin dropped tons of fascinating tidbits about her childhood and background– her childhood home sounded like an earthship, I’m interested in small town Idaho given its propensity to host situations like the Randy Weaver shootout or the family from Educated (which she does cover in the essay I liked), and she went to college when she was 16 and graduated at 19. But as for that last one, she says deeply embarrassing things like when she quotes a text message from her bf that says ”do you think your superior intelligence will doom you to be forever alone?”, and she responds “My answer is sort of obviously yes” apparently without irony. Bolin is open about the fact that she thought all of her coworkers at a restaurant were not people with hopes and dreams like her, and she felt better than them because she was a ~writer~. Her larger point made sense, that when you’re working a shitty job on your way to your dreams it can be easier to get through by telling yourself that this isn’t your real life, this is just temporary, you’re not A Waitress like those other losers, you’re a Writer (who waits tables to get by). She then finally realizes that most of her coworkers have side gigs as well, and almost none of them intended for this to be their true career. But even if they had, would they still not be considered people in Bolin’s eyes? To a certain extent I think everyone has a wake up call where they’re served a slice of humble pie and must realize that everyone around you also has interiority, but you should realize that much earlier in life than 25 lol. I guess props for admitting that?
The book is written in 2018, and everything from the Trump years is slightly poisoned and embarrassing to read now, so I have to cut her a little slack because we are too recent from that time period to look at it with nostalgia, so it feels dated. Bolin acknowledges over and over again that she is a white woman and she knows that a large part of the dead white woman tripe is the whiteness of said woman. But sometimes I wished that rather than simply acknowledging this fact and apologizing for being white, she had highlighted a case wherein a woman of color went missing or died, even a fictional character, and contrasted that case. Rachel Aviv, also a white girl, wrote a fantastic essay collection last year about mental illness, and she includes memoir-y bits about her own story, but she also included such a wide range of subjects which gave the reader a way deeper understanding and contemplation of the ways in which race and class impact one’s experience with severe mental illness. It was way more impactful to hear those other stories than if she had just written about her own experience with a ton of guilt ridden disclaimers about how she knows she’s privileged blah blah blah.
I lost my juice of writing this review because I uncharacteristically returned the book before reviewing it and I then read I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai which raised some similar questions/themes about true crime and the Dead Girl Phenomena. I definitely mentally glossed over much of the essays about Joan Didion, partially because I haven’t read any of her work besides Year of Magical Thinking but also because I was just not that interested. Generally when you read criticism you should be able to still get something out of it even if you haven’t read/watched the thing being critiqued. But she did cover some cultural detritus that I really love like Gone Girl, Britney Spears, The Millenium Trilogy (I really need to reread that series because when I read it I was too young to understand anything about corruption, I just thought Lisbeth Salander was really cool. I do recall noting that Blomkvist had sex with literally every single woman that he came across in the book regardless of if it made sense to do so.)
I read the Britney Rolling Stone profile that Bolin mentions, and then later that day I listened to the song Lucky and literally burst into tears omg. Britney was so formative for me– when I was a kid I was a dork/nerd and my hero fixations were historical figures like Amelia Earheart or Sadako the girl who died from cancer in the atomic bombs. Then one day when I was probably 7 or 8 my uncle’s gf’s daughter who was slightly older than me showed me something that would change my life. It was Lucky by Britney Spears and that moment made me realize there was an entire world I was unaware of and I truly feel it was a fork in the road moment for me that initiated me into womanhood like I am being dramatic but I’m so serious… Plus the plight of Britney Spears really does depress me in the same way I feel about Amy Whinehouse. Thinking of Britney as a Living Dead Girl makes me so sad and I don’t think we will know the actual truth about her life for a very long time!
The first essay in this collection she’s spitting on a topic I am passionate about: the fact that True Detective is an inferior child of Twin Peaks. Sorry the rest of this paragraph is a almost completely incoherent run on sentence about my thoughts on these two shows where none of the ideas are fully formed & they don’t really have anything to do with this book Tbh Bolin is not that generous toward Twin Peak’s treatment of Laura Palmer, which I disagree with because in some ways Laura Palmer is the stereotypical dead girl the beautiful popular blonde but I feel that as the series progresses we do get a full fleshed out sense of who she was in all her complexity, and there is no mention of Fire Walk With Me or the Return which I believe was out by the time this book came out. I’m definitely a bigger fan of Twin Peaks than she is (not as in I’m a more dedicated fan, I literally mean I like it more than she appears to, I think it’s a genius portrayal of the darkness of America and of True Evil), but she and I are on the same page about True Detective. Bolin is simultaneously “annoyed and inspired by the heavy-handedness of its entire mission”. Matthew Mcconahey and Woody Harrelson put on excellent performances, and it’s a technically well-made show, and very entertaining. But I really felt it was lacking something important regarding femininity. The women in the show are basically window dressing from the wives/mistresses, the dead daughter as Rust Cohle’s backstory padding, and the dead girls that they are investigating/rescuing are not REAL girls, they are the idea of girls in like a fascist “protect women and children” abstract concept. Both shows are suffused with the supernatural and the hauntedness of the land around them, land that the main characters know on a subconscious level they should not be on. I wish Rust Cohle didn’t have that silly backstory so you have plausible deniability that he’s hallucinating things and fuck that side track ass episode where there’s the raid and the motorcycle gang omg. I’m ranting and none of this is consequential or important but I just think True Detective is lacking the feminine in a way that other similar works like Twin Peaks or From Hell have, which is hard to articulate because i don’t think either of those works would pass the bechdel test either I’m not saying that it’s not a feminist enough portrayal of women or whatever, it’s not merely the depth of female characters, that’s not what I’m talking about. All 3 of these stories are about deep evil verging on the supernatural, ritual sacrifice of women, corruption at every level of power, and all are told from the perspective of a detective on the case. But Twin Peaks and From Hell get into a deep dark terror of divine proportions, like a horror of femininity on a primal level and the resultant denigration of women. Laura Palmer is a symbol too in addition to being a fleshed out character, she is the terrain on which a huge good vs evil battle is being waged but it feels like she’s a lightning rod for something so large it’s Lovecraftian, it’s bigger and deeper and older than her and the town. The girls in TD are faceless victims who need to be protected by Rust and Woody Harrelson, and neither of them care about women beyond them being like little lambs to protect to make themselves feel big and strong!! Cosmic horror is also very present in TD and that aspect is well done, it’s just missing the divine dark feminine tiamat etc. I had to look up the name of the girl killed in TD- Dora Lange– but no one who watches Twin Peaks will forget Laura Palmer! The most compelling aspect of the show is the complex relationship between the two detectives, which is fine. It did a great job on that front, and like I said I don’t think it’s a bad show I just have this grating problem with it that I have struggled to get to the bottom of and I would probably need to rewatch both TD and Twin Peaks to articulate what it is, this sounds like i merely liked Twin Peaks more which I did but I did in fact have a good time watching true detective, I like quality HBO shows as much as the next guy. I just feel like there was something that TD didn’t understand & it's for the Boys (™) ¬ for the girlies in a way that irritates me . TD is giving place beyond the pines and a man explaining nietzsche and Twin Peaks is giving lana del rey & has something for everyone . Again all 3 of these pieces of media are about the slaughter of sex workers TD treatment of women just annoys me in particular, Twin Peaks and From Hell are ABOUT misogyny (among other things) but TD is too misogynist itself to say anything profound on the topic
More than anything this book suffered from being marketed as one thing when it was actually another. More essays on the presented theme should’ve been here, and then a separate book of Joan Didion style personal essays
jamiezaccaria's review
3.0
This was a unique essay collection blending the author's personal life with society's obsession with the female mystique (specifically her death). I enjoyed some sections more than others and my favorite was Part 3. Bolin is certainly a rich storyteller, if sometimes too rich, most of the time great.
becsal's review
3.75
Some of the essays I really liked and made me think about media in a way I hadn’t before but also I didn’t really like her personal perspective and experience inclusion