Dead Girls

In her debut essay collection, Alice Bolin examines both America’s cultural preoccupation with dead girls as well as its ongoing mistreatment of living women. In addition to dissecting dead girls as a longstanding literary trope, she casts a critical eye on the narratives surrounding several cultural phenomena. An admirer of Joan Didion, she also traces her own journey from the remote Idaho to bustling Los Angeles and reflects on the path she’s taken.

The relationship between author and subject is sometimes complex and sometimes messy. Some authors eschew the personal while others confront it head-on. Handled artfully, autobiographical digressions can enrich and contextualize a work of nonfiction: Michell McNamara’s excellent I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a good example thereof. But rather than use personal anecdotes to advance her central point, Bolin seems torn between unpacking the implications “dead girls” and telling her story, and the thematic connections that she attempts to draw between the two seem strained. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, Dead Girls suffers from an identity crisis.

Then again, while hewing more closely to a premise may have resulted in a more coherent book, it would not necessarily have been a more insightful one. That premise is that dead girls in noir fiction serve as male fantasies. Stripped of agency, identity, and life itself, they become little more than a means of ennobling avenging male protagonists. Bolin, who is both well-read and culturally well-versed, finds plenty of supporting examples for this idea in everything from the classic noir of Raymond Chandler (whose femme fatales, like his dead girls, were exaggerated forms of male wish fulfillment) to the contemporary drama of True Detective. She also sees right through the performative faux-feminism of Stieg Larsson (who originally titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo “Men who Hate Women”) and calls out the Millennium Trilogy for its cringeworthy sexualization of its heroine and reliance on dated tropes.

Problems arise, however, when Bolin attempts to extend this connection to examples that don’t support it. For instance, she miscasts Gone Girl’s Nick Dunne as a “classic male victim” and thus a successor to the misogynistic male leads of yore even though the novel depicts him as culpable and compromised in ways that his forebears were not. Even when discussing the potential for toxicity in close relationships between women, Bolin can’t help but dip into the same well, framing the hurt that women inflict upon one another as a product of a sexist society. Given that Bolin discusses her own such mistreatment of a former close friend, this comes across as all too conveniently exculpatory. And given how many straws Bolin is grasping it in some cases (puzzling, as there are many more relevant examples that would have fit), it is perhaps for the best that the book did not stay on-point the entire way through.

The book’s off-topic segments range from insightful to insufferable. Bolin successfully draws attention to the gaps between perception in reality in everything from Britney Spears’ artistry and breakdown to the Bling Ring case. She also captures the desolation of her home state and the violence (in this case, the Ruby Ridge standoff). And while she lays on her Didion-worship a bit too thick, she does a reasonably imitation, presenting a young life in flux in L.A.. On the other hand, Bolin sometimes comes across as unbearably selfish, whether it is her condescending speculation about where her father fits on the autistic spectrum or her decision to steal a date’s hat and cut off contact because she enjoyed the feeling of finality. Annoyingly, Bolin writes of the privileged place afforded to white women yet never gets around to realizing her own (relative to the larger issues the rest of the book addresses) lack of importance.

As cultural criticism, Dead Girls offers both hits and misses, pointing to a troubling trend while also painting with too wide a brush. As a memoir, it is occasionally evocative though often vapid and alienating. Bolin shows flashes of intelligent, perceptive writing, but that ability begs to be liberated from her self-aggrandizing focus.