A moral panic over mean girls
+ books and links
Friday reminders: This Sunday I’m teaching a 3-hour seminar, Against Heroism at 10am PT/ 1pm ET. (Discount code for ALL paid subscribers is here.) Join us—it will be so fun to see you.
Next week is our first ever Mad Woman Writing Group retreat. The full schedule and all Zoom links are here. To join us, remember to upgrade to the Writing Group member subscription (that’s the founding tier). Until Sunday, you can do that for just $100.
Here’s a little preview of the schedule for those who are curious: We are doing an introduction and goal-setting session Monday at 4pm PT and two write-ins Tuesday & Thursday mornings at 10am PT. I’m also holding an office hour for you to ask me writing and craft questions on Wednesday at 1pm PT. On Friday we’ll have a community share/”open studio” at 4pm PT. You can come to as much or as little as you want.
You can also read an interview with me at The New York Times!
I’ve been watching Under the Bridge, a TV miniseries on Hulu based on the book by journalist Rebecca Godfrey about the horrific 1997 murder of Reena Virk. Only a couple of episodes have been released, but I’m finding myself both rapt and questioning— thinking about how we/I am drawn to the violence of teenage girls, and why.
When I was in elementary school, I got into a fight with some of my best friends on the playground. They pulled my hair and threw my body across the blacktop. I think we slapped each other all over, on the arms, too young to know how to make fists. It was my only real first-hand encounter with physical violence as kid, at least violence of that sort, but later, I witnessed many teenage brawls at school and at weekend keg parties.
When I was in middle school, my closest girlfriends put a hex on me (they used cat litter and ??). We ended up in the school counselor’s office to discuss it all. I remember crying and crying, feeling so alone. I don’t remember what I’d done to piss the other girls off. I was probably being an asshole. Or maybe I had just fallen out of their favor because of my clothes or my hair or my dorky attitude.
In high school, one of my biggest fears was getting “jumped” after school, but it never happened to me. The threat of violence between girls was always there though, especially as I got more into getting high and hung out with different crowds— girls like me who were struggling with precarious home lives, but also those who weren’t like me, who experienced racism and home lives more fraught than my own.