Dead Girls

very disappointed

DNF


The first four essays, I read were not cohesive. I hate to DNF a book, but I couldn't push through this one

Can I give the first third of the book 4 stars and the remaining 2/3 1 star? I thought this would be a collection of essays about, you know, dead girls in popular culture. The first part does that exceptionally well, with lots of fodder to re-think all the mystery and crime novels I've been reading. I found most of Bolin's own essays to be navel-gazing L.A. bullshit.

I thought this was great! I definitely thought it would be more true crime focused but I'm so glad it wasn't. It has been a long time since I read some literary/cultural criticism essays and these were awesome. It's so nice to find someone else who truly appreciated what Gillian Flynn did in Gone Girl - and what all the other “girl”-titled thrillers (All the girls, The good girl, The girl on the train, etc) that came after missed completely!

I'd love to read the book this was advertised as. While Bolin's stories about her life—dotted occasionally with stray observations about media, race, and gender—were just interesting enough to keep me reading, the actual meat of this book could really only fill a long essay.

Part 1: The Dead Girl Show almost lives up to the hype. The first 50 pages would have gotten 4 stars from me. Parts 2 and 3 stray away from what was advertised and become a memoir of Bolin's life in LA and her adolescence, which would have merited 3 stars. Part 4: A Sentimental Education was unfortunately difficult to get through, and ending on that disappointment soured the rest of the book for me. Hence 2 stars.

The synopsis for this book had me immediately. The pervasive fascination with true crime has dulled our culture's ability to examine and alter some disturbing mindsets we've mindlessly adopted. This book had that opportunity.

The first few chapters were intriguing investigations. Then, the focus collapsed into a memoir about a young woman's transition to Los Angeles. It was a confusing pivot and I waited in vain for Bolin to return to the Dead Girls matter at hand, on book jacket.

She is a talented writer. Unquestionably. But this collection of essays would have been stronger as two separate books.

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.