deeply earthy, witchy, and powerful: A Conversation with Alice Bolin on the Tropes of Genre and Gender

Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls (Harper Collins 2018), a collection of essays about crime, gender, and the American West. Her criticism, personal essays, and journalism have appeared in publications including Elle, Salon, Racked, The Awl, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vulture, New York Magazine, The Paris Review online, and The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. Her poems have been published in Guernica, Washington Square, Blackbird, and Ninth Letter, among many other journals.

On March 16, 2023, Alice Bolin joined The Interlochen Review editors Emily Pickering, Anna Graef, Mackerel Smith, and Ben Berman for a conversation about her essay collection Dead Girls.

EMILY PICKERING: In Dead Girls, specifically in your essay “Toward a Theory of a Dead Girls Show,” you ironically discuss themes of shows featuring a certain type of characters, such as “girls that are wild, formidable creatures that need to be protected from the power of their own sexualities.” You discuss shows like Pretty Little Liars that subvert the expectation of their faults; what first began your fascination with these tropes, and how has that developed through your interrogation of them?

ALICE BOLIN: I think it was when I was living in Missoula, Montana. I had finished grad school, I was in my early twenties, and I remember I had watched Twin Peaks for the first time, this classic, early nineties, noir show. And I was really taken with how much stranger and more over-the-top the show was than I was expecting, and saw how it was the blueprint for so many shows that came afterward, shows I had watched for years, and I realized, they keep making this show again and again! The same show, with remarkably similar tropes; not just that it starts with a dead girl, but the ways that the dead girl was treated, the ways the father figures in the show acted and how the other young girls in the show were treated. There were so many common threads, and even sub-themes or sub-types. That’s why I call it the “Theory of the Dead Girls Show.” Then I didn’t even end up writing the essay for about a year after I had started thinking about it, I was just gathering data, noticing other examples and taking notes. And then came True Detective. I don’t think anyone even cares about this show anymore, but it was this huge phenomenon when HBO first started streaming. Everyone was talking about it, and they actually crashed HBO Now because people were like, “I gotta find out what happens!” And at the end it’s a really unsatisfying show, but to me, this huge craze, I knew that it would be the topical hook to finally write “The Dead Girls Show” piece that I had been thinking about for so long. So that was how it came together. It was really slow, but I was building in my mind and finding more examples before I actually sat down. I remember I went to the library and sat down and wrote it, probably in two days.

ANNA GRAEF: The essays in Dead Girls heavily resonate with myself and other American women as they speak to the concept of existing as a feminine person in a society whose pop culture often communicates a general sense of disregard for our personhood. Having considered this as a part of literary canon, why do you think it’s important to consider this aspect of femininity now of all times, and further, do you have any ideas on how certain tropes could be reversed in a way that feels authentic in the future?

AB: I have two ways of thinking about literary tropes and cliches, where I think in some ways it can be really fun to play with these tropes, and ultimately gender is just a set of tropes. I mean, Judith Butler or other gender theorists, that's how they describe it, where it’s more a bucket of characteristics than it is any kind of coherent idea. Things we associate with masculinity and femininity don’t necessarily associate with each other. They’re just arbitrary sets of standards that are created through cultural meaning-making, and through things like art and popular culture. So ultimately I think we all have fun playing with gender, or many of us do, but the meanings of gender should always be questioned in terms of whether or not they’re actually meaningful or arbitrary, and most often I think they are arbitrary. There’s a famous connection between the words “gender” and “genre;” they're the same word in French and a lot of other languages, and genre is also just a set of tropes. So I think that’s why it was something I was really interested in and why a lot of the times I would say my book is about “gender violence in the American West,” but sometimes I would say it’s about “genre violence in the American West.”

MACKEREL SMITH: In your essays and your interview with Longreads, you talk about how women are often portrayed as sexual beings, and how the dead girls are used to make a point about the man. Keeping this in mind, have you read A Certain Hunger? While it’s not true crime, it’s still a novel from the perspective of a female serial killer, who’s also a cannibal, but more notably obsessed with sex. She’s written as this nymphomaniac genius killer, and this puts her in the place of power, but also feeds into the seeming need for sexualization. How do you feel about this combination of empowerment and fetishization of the female serial killer?

AB: Right, the “maneater,” that’s literal in her case. One thing I like about that example in that book, which I haven’t read but I’ve been meaning to, is that Chelsea G. Summers writes often about being a woman of middle age and the ways that older women are totally desexualized in our culture, whereas in other, premodern cultures, women who were past menopause were highly sexualized—that’s the trope of Isis, this goddess and older woman with young male concubines. And so, part of what Summers is doing with that book is questioning that desexualization and returning to these older tropes, really showing that these things are all culturally constructed, that the way we think about people and about gender can be thrown on its head just through narrative.

I’m totally not against genre fiction, horror, noir stuff, I think it can be really fun, especially stuff that just really goes for it, like cannibal stuff. I have an essay about werewolf movies, other things that are really extreme quite often, especially since we live in such an extreme place, America, which can quite often get at the heart of our true feelings about culture, about society, and our real fears about our deepest selves. That’s where the idea of subverting a narrative is interesting, when people really push those boundaries of what we expect, because I think within genre fiction, the imperative is always to redo the story, otherwise you’re just retelling the story. Since you’re working within formulas and expected tropes, unless you turn it on its head, you’re just retelling and retreading the same path, and that’s why—I don’t want to namecheck, but even Agatha Christie, or other writers, quite often you’re getting a couple of books that are really similar. That’s fun if you’re a fan, but a lot of times people that think they’re subverting are really just reiterating. I think the idea of subversion can be done, and that’s the way we push culture forward, through subversive work and subversive material, but we do have to question if we’re actually subverting tropes or if we’re just playing with them and being naughty for fun.

BEN BERMAN: Last semester I took a nonfiction workshop class, and one of the assignments was to write an ode or polemic essay. For that class we read “My Students Dress So Much Better Than I Do,” and “All American Drag,” and one thing I really admire about those pieces of work is that you take a middle ground stance on topics like Alice in Wonderland and country music in both, where you talk about the things you enjoy about them, but the essay doesn’t fall into classic ode or polemic stance. What I was wondering is, how do you like writing in the middle and how do you avoid biased viewpoints in your work?

AB: I think nuance is really important, and is ultimately the most satisfying thing about a piece of work is when somebody doesn’t really know how to feel about something, or they think they know how they feel, but it gets complicated by the end. Because, ultimately, if you just hate something or just love something, it’s not really worth writing about. Especially if you just love something, and this comes from years of teaching that same kind of assignment, the polemic invective. I think, more often, the thing that I end up wanting to write about is the thing where I don’t know how to feel. Maybe there’s an attraction/repulsion element, where you’re like, “Oh, I hate this thing so much, I can’t stop thinking about it,” or, “I love this thing but I shouldn’t.” And reveling in it, because then you have somewhere to go with it. That’s what you’re writing about, that’s your question, “why do I love this thing so much?” or “why do I hate this thing so much but I love to hate it?” And a lot of the time it tells you something deeper, like how you think about yourself. And then you can get into bigger questions about culture, and maybe place it alongside something unexpected, which is where it opens up these connections that are unexpected, when you have this indecisiveness or ambiguity. I love the ode/polemic assignment because it can be really good to start mining some of those interests, but I also think it can be a lot more productive where you’re not quite either, or you’re writing an ode that’s also a polemic, the kind of mixture where I love to fall as a critic.

EP: In an essay from Dead Girls, “Lonely Heart,” you discuss Britney Spears and the polarities of her work and persona, how that can appear calculating at times, and balance this with personal descriptions of being a lonely yet specifically intelligent sixteen year old in college. I was curious as to whether you felt your personal contradictions have heightened your work.

AB: For sure. I think that as an essayist, it’s great to take the stance of an outsider, and a lot of writers in general have that feeling of not quite belonging. Maybe it’s from a more true sort of identity or classical sense of identity, but it might be something more ineffable. I grew up in Idaho, in a really small town, but my parents were university professors, and I felt I was living in two different worlds: going to college when I was super young, and having this feeling that I should be this little whiz kid, but at the time I was just reading magazines and watching MTV. I really was not this super high achieving kid, and I think that cultivating those sorts of aspects, where I didn’t quite feel like I belonged or what people saw in me was not who I truly was, which was a really productive place as a writer of nonfiction. Those can be really great places to mine material from, because I think that if you have this really predetermined path, or if your way is just paved for you, there’s not really much point in introspection. I also think all of us have had that feeling of not fulfilling some vision of you, or feeling on the outside, even if people think you’re on the inside. I do think that it’s related to Ben’s question about not quite knowing where you stand. It’s also true in a personal way, when you have those experiences where you’re both in and out, you’re not purely on the outside but you’re not purely on the inside. I think that’s the best place to write from, where you have some insider knowledge to some extent, but you can also see it from an outsider’s eyes.

AG: As a bit of a teen witch myself, an essay that stood out to me in particular was “A Teen Witch’s Guide to Staying Alive.” In the essay, you mention the relationship between a woman and her relationship with food and therefore her body, something young women often struggle with. Female adolescence and witchcraft is something that is often connected in contemporary pop culture, with Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Craft, and My Babysitter’s a Vampire are all coming to mind. Could you speak a bit on how these pre-existing connections might have influenced your work on this essay in particular? Or further, why do you think they may be connected at all?

AB: Yeah, when I was writing the book I wanted to cut that essay, I wanted to cut the whole section, actually. I think the reason was because it was a little too vulnerable ultimately, but the reason I told myself was, “Oh it’s just so cliché, teen girls and witchcraft, everyone’s heard it before.” Like you’re saying, it’s a really common trope within pop culture. But I also think there’s something true about it. Young, especially girls, but really all young people have this sort of connection to the spiritual world, or to mystery, or to darkness that we attempt to lose when we get older. We kind of attempt to put it in the drawer. When I was even littler than a teen, I was attempting to do these weird spells, like blowing bubbles and thinking there was a fairy inside them. I think those possibilities are open. When you’re a kid, there’s a thin veil between the real world and the world that is more mysterious or spiritual. I knew I wanted to go there in the book because that’s a part of the dead girl trope; these girls are mysterious and witchy and powerful in some strange way. But I think then I really realized how much these tropes had to do with eating, with food, with domesticity and with control, which is also what eating disorders are about, that was when I was like, “maybe there’s something deeper here than teenage girls and witches.” I wanted to honor the fact that these ritualistic ways of living, which can be both pathological and deeply spiritual and meaningful, are a part of living as a woman, being a teenager, and growing up. So I think I wanted to explore those ideas and the ways that things that are coated as traditionally feminine are also often seen as very deeply earthy, witchy, powerful, and can be held up as being more than just home-ec and women’s work.

BB: In Dead Girls, you balance analyzing pop culture like country music, supernatural work, and Alice in Wonderland with your own memories and personal histories. How do you balance both the critical and the personal in your essays, and what about this process allows you to say more about yourself?

AB: I think this is sort of the perennial question for me. How to balance things that are more personal with my broader societal ideas. When I was younger, or really starting out in nonfiction, I would just use the personal as a hook or a way to add something more literary to a piece that would feel a little dry. I didn’t want to. I felt like it’s really about my ideas and analysis, I shouldn’t have to reveal everything about myself. It’s uncomfortable and I was young, so my insights about myself were still forming. Some of that stuff was too raw, really, to touch. So, as I’ve gotten older as a writer, it’s become easier to acknowledge that all these things are really interrelated. My feelings about the world, my ideas about culture and society, and my personal experiences are all a part of the same thing, which is a texture of my broader experience of life. These things that I spent so much time thinking about and consuming like TV, books, or music are a big part of my life. They aren’t incidental to my life, they run alongside my other experiences. As I’m writing my new book, it’s become a lot easier to integrate the two things because it feels like I’m speaking straight from an experience I’ve had or from my experience from my culture in more of an immediate way and going deeper into an experience rather than having them be two parts that sit alongside each other. They’re more integrated because I see them as a more integrated part of my life or as creating something that is my life and my experience. Now I see them as all part of my experience.

MS: In the Q&A last night, you talked a bit about what you should keep in mind when drafting nonfiction, and part of that was having a focus on two or more threads in an essay. Do you tend to naturally find the content of those threads, or would you say it’s easier to brainstorm and incorporate threads after the first drafting stage?

AB: I feel like usually I like to know what threads I’m working with ahead of time. I’m quite a pre-writer, I will do a lot of work before I actually sit down and write. That might be research, freewriting, making a bunch of lists. I do outlines too. I used to be way more of an outliner than I am now. Now, I outline the part I'm working on for that day or week, rather than outlining the whole thing. Especially if you're writing long, it can become very overwhelming to do that. I like to know generally what I'm working with before I go into the actual composition process. I just think it’s less overwhelming that way. Trying to fold stuff in afterward is very difficult. I rewrote a lot of essays that are in Dead Girls for publication. I had to expand them, rewrite, and fold in more things. That becomes like taking a skeleton and putting more bones on it. It feels ungainly. For me, I like to know what the skeleton looks like before I start putting flesh on it. Generally, one of my strengths as a writer is if I’m like, “I want to write about this,” my mind starts overloading with associations and ideas. So I can start writing a list of where I want to go with my research and prewriting. As I’m going, I start whittling it down and it starts to take on more of a shape. When I was writing Dead Girls, a lot of the time I really would want to write about this one thing like Ginger Snaps, one of my favorite werewolf movies, and I was thinking, what’s the other piece? Maybe I would look in my personal life, pop culture, or in books. I think about how I can bring something else in. A lot of the time, I have to know at least two threads before I even think it’s an essay in my mind.

EP: You previously said that Dead Girls came together around Los Angeles, and I was curious as to how the setting enhanced the dissonance in your stories or whether there was other literature that you read that impacted that choice at all.

AB: I think place is super important for my writing. And I had been living in Montana and grew up in Idaho, so a lot of my essays had already had this kind of Northwest-y, in the woods kind of vibe, but then moving to LA it was a totally other aspect of the American West that I had never experienced or even really thought about. There's so much literature like noir literature, crime stories, and even people like Joan Didion, essayists who have thought about California, thought about Los Angeles. So to me, it was really beautiful because the place aspect of the book came together through my experience of that place, just the vibes that seep into your writing when you live there, and through literature and other cultural documents that I was thinking about. It's like a form and content thing, marrying form and content where I could write about Joan Didion but also borrow some of her flavor or some of her sentences to create something that had this California feel. It also really is about my moving to LA and then moving away, so there's a sense of driftlessness. I think that it's cool, when you're writing about place, that you're also mapping direction and movement, and that sense of a place, because we're never just in one place, we're always moving around. Especially the American West, that's a huge part of it; drifting around the highway system or a lot of migrant workers, people who are itinerant or on the run. That was really interesting to me too, that sense of movement.

AG: In Dead Girls you explore the idea that existing femininely in our culture often means also existing in a perpetual state of tension, particularly with men. As women, we all have personal experience with tense moments, and I was wondering if you would be willing to talk broadly on any past experiences that you might find influential in your work?

AB: I think that’s something that is actually really difficult to reckon with as a feminist writer. Both the sense of violence against women that is perpetuated by men, and what we see as inherent problems with heterosexual relationships or relationships between men and women, whether they're sexual or not. Because I don't believe in gender essentialism, I don't believe anyone is inherently a man or a woman, but I also see that the ways that we are socialized in our culture does privilege certain kinds of people over others and does allow certain kinds of people to commit violence towards others. And that isn't strictly men versus women; It has to do with other aspects like race and class, and there are a lot of women who are empowered to do violence towards other kinds of people, depending on those other identity factors. I have had experiences of what you're talking about: conflict, tension violence when it comes to relationships between men and women, and it's something that is interesting for me to write about and influences my work. The writer Elissa Washuta is one of the people, I think, who writes best about these kinds of issues, especially about violence that she's experienced, but she sees it also through the lens of being a Native woman, something that is endemic to that population. And it takes on different kinds of meanings depending on different shades of identity. So I guess that's where I come down on it. And, the truth is that I'm also very interested in relationships that women have with women, romantic or just sisterly friendship, because those relationships are also influenced by our hierarchies when it comes to gender, and they are also often violent, abusive, problematic, as well as nurturing and beautiful. These sorts of questions of violence or conflict between the sexes are very interesting, but I also think we can explore broadening our view, to look at all of the systems of dominance and the ways that they impact our relationships, our trauma, what we do to one another, the way we treat one another.

BB: One thing you've mentioned multiple times previously is that you used to work in an arts high school while also writing and publishing your own work. Now that you're working at a university, do you mind sharing your experience working in an arts high school while also being a published author?

AB: Sure. I loved my experience. I worked at Idyllwild, which is quite similar to Interlochen, and I felt that actually that atmosphere was one of the most conducive for me to write my own work. It's such a beautiful creative atmosphere, where there are so many different kinds of art going on and students are so eager to learn and so fresh. When you teach at college and grad school, which is what I was doing up until now, the students can be very jaded or they're just busy as hell. And, I know you guys are busy too, but it's in a different way, where you have a safe haven to really work on yourselves as artists. Once you get into the real world, especially where I was teaching at the University of Memphis, which is a commuter school, there are a lot of older students and students with kids there. Even though they were awesome students and so smart, it's still not the same kind of environment. And so, it was really special for me because that was my first teaching job at Idyllwild. I felt like I was growing with the students as a teacher, and it was a really safe environment for me to try new things; the students would go along with stuff that I wanted to do, and there wasn’t such a huge emphasis on grading or professionalization or other things I would have to worry about once I moved on to working at the college and grad school level. I could do things that were focused just on growing as artists, exploring what art means and it really was inspiring for my work. A lot of the book was written there. I went back to visit once my book had been published, which was really special because it was such a connection to that place and I remembered, this is where a lot of my inspiration came from, this community.

BB: Would you like to share any of your future or current projects with us?

AB: Sure! So I have two more books coming out. One is a mini book, a book-length essay about the color pink. I don't really know where I'm going with that one, yet. I haven't started to research, but it's been one of my dreams to write this book about pink for a really long time. My next book, which I'm just finishing up now, is a collection of essays called Cosmos that's about women, tech, and where we're going in terms of gender in the 21st century. I have a lot of angst, as might be obvious from this interview, about the ways that we see gender and the ways that those dynamics are perpetuated and shown within work and culture. And the idea of whether the future is female, it's like, well, no, it's not in my opinion. So I’m thinking about the ways that women’s work is going to change, as well as how regressive our ideas about gender and women's place in society still are, the ways that those things need to change in order to move beyond this system of gender that, like I said, is truly just a collection of tropes.