It just came to seem to me that if we wanted to talk about what being a woman was, then it was maybe time to start digging into those darker feelings of powerlessness and helplessness and living inside an extremely stigmatized and vulnerable body, and that’s why, whenever I have to talk about this book, I have to talk about bodies.Īnd I don’t ever want to say that there is only one female body, there are so many different women and cis women and trans women both live in deeply stigmatized bodies. The #MeToo movement and the Harvey Weinstein story broke about two months after I started writing this book, but already there was a lot of darkness and trauma in the air that then exploded and became a huge part of the narrative around what being a woman was about.

With Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, I had just gotten married, I was pregnant, and while I was writing the book proposal, Trump won the presidency, and all of a sudden we were skidding into a narrative that was not about progress at all, that was very much about the fact that we were probably going to lose Roe v. But it was written with this optimistic sense of “Well, maybe now it’s all finally over and women can just be themselves in public.” Those were the stakes at the time. And it’s a fairly dark book: it’s about mental illness and addiction and trauma and death, which my writings tend to be about. Trainwreck, my first book, is very much a product of the aughts feminist boom, and it is about media. It comes from the shift into a much darker and less optimistic version of gender politics that we were facing.

And she never loses the central thread of how men relate to, and try to control, women, labeling them monsters when they resist, or when they remind them of their own worst selves. From “Psycho” and “Godzilla” to “Frankenstein,” “Carrie,” Donald Trump and the incel underground, Doyle weaves together a dizzying array of sources and arguments.

Dead blondes bad mothers