Sady Doyle Boeken

The Female Monster is alive and well in the pop-cultural imagination. What does she tell us about ourselves and how we live today?Funny, smart and encyclopedic, nimbly addressing everyone from the biblical Lilith, to the movie Carrie, to Hae Min Lee (whose death was the focus of the first season of "Serial"), this book is dedicated to exploring the female dark side, as represented in female monsters throughout pop culture. These monsters—who tend to follow a few very common forms—express taboo truths about female life, and femininity. They speak to urges women are encouraged to hide, or deny. They also speak to the viciousness with which a sexist society inflicts traditionally feminine roles upon us. This is a sympathetic—or, at least, curious—look at the women we fear and what they show us about how women navigate a dangerous and frightening world.

“Smart ... compelling ... persuasive .” —New York Times Book Review She’s everywhere once you start looking: the trainwreck. She’s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying “crack is whack,” and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself. From Mary Wollstonecraft—who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to “behave.” Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Doyle’s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.