"A collection of sharp, poignant essays that expertly blends the personal and political in an exploration of American culture through the lens of our obsession with dead women"--
I cannot stand a marketing bait and switch moment. This book is not really about dead girls or about what their prominence in Western pop culture means. Bolin touches on that briefly at the beginning of the book, but she doesn't come to any particularly groundbreaking conclusion beyond "misogyny is bad, the pain of women is used to further men's character development, and I hate the show True Detective". She takes great pains to mention that she went to grad school several times, but this is not graduate level cultural analysis. Some of her essays are interesting; I enjoyed her thoughts on Britney Spears, Alexis Neiers, and the camp horror film Ginger Snaps. But make no mistake: the "essays on Twin peaks and Serial" this book promises are really just a name drops or a few paragraphs that don't come to any particularly enlightening conclusions. So much of this book is about Bolin, and how she moved to Los Angeles at age twenty-five (seriously, this book is about LA more than anything else), and how she's read everything Joan Didion has ever written. It's frustrating, because she's clearly a talented, lucid author, but this is not the book it purports to be and the book it actually is is not all that interesting. For all the deconstruction Bolin does of white womanhood it's ironic that she spends so much time writing about her own unremarkable white womanhood, though she thinks her move to LA from the midwest is somehow special because she isn't chasing fame. Well, her life in LA is not particularly interesting, and neither is this book.
