Dead Girls

The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts

Particularly disturbing are the ways that white female victims become the mascots of campaigns against “crime,” which can almost always be read as campaigns against a city’s poor and nonwhite residents

sixties and seventies counterculture: having been helpless children during the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, they tended to view despair not as political but existential

I see now that my mission inaugurated with The Flamethrowers was an attempt to discover who I could be as a writer without Didion as my guiding star

Didion writes that public fascination cast Hearst’s story as “a special kind of sentimental education, a public coming-of-age.”

He experienced some of the struggles of black American expatriation that James Baldwin identified: that in order to achieve the kind of security one could not have in the United States, a black person must pay the price of complicity and self-hatred

thus they found the commercial distasteful

Rachel Kushner’s art-and-anarchy novel The Flamethrowers

This contradiction produces shame and anger in girls, who take out their rage on the only people who are vulnerable to them, by punishing and policing their sisters but also themselves

but that our culture encourages female intimacy while also despising women without men and suspecting that they are wild and sinister