Dead Girls

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.