Publisher's Weekly Review
Pop-culture commentator Doyle launches a ruthlessly funny, smart, and relentlessly on-point takedown of modern misogyny in this feminist anatomy of celebrity "trainwrecks" and the "appetite for specifically female ruin and suffering" that fuels entire venues of popular entertainment. Contemplating her subjects' crimes (having sex, having needs, having opinions) and her subjects' options (self-destruct, disappear, or risk the continual public fury to which a woman who refuses to be shamed, silenced, or stopped is exposed), Doyle compiles portraits including those of historical figures such as Charlotte Brontë and midcentury icons such as Billie Holiday and Sylvia Plath to such contemporary subjects of spectacle as Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, and Britney Spears. She surmises that the train wreck earns hatred for violating the rules of "good" behavior. But in her profiles of non-self-immolating women such as Harriet Jacobs, Hillary Clinton, and the French revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, Doyle suggests that the revulsion is stirred not by the train wreck's questionable behavior but by the fact of her being a visible, vocal female. Doyle's book is really an exposé of persistent cultural pathologies about women and sex, a "200-year-old problem" of enforcing myths about good behavior that essentially prevent women from being the subjects of their own lives. With compassion for its subjects and a vibrantly satirical tone, Doyle's debut book places her on the A-list of contemporary feminist writers. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
In her first book, journalist Doyle (Tiger Beatdown) invites us to interrogate the cultural figure of "the trainwreck": women who are ritually humiliated, find their careers destroyed, lose their privacy-in some cases their legal and physical autonomy-and are not infrequently left to die for their sins (real or imagined). Across eight thematic chapters, Doyle asks: Who are these women? What are their crimes? When caught in the vortex of a trainwreck narrative, what are their options? And finally, what role does the concept, and the individuals whose lives it devours, play in society? Each chapter includes historical and contemporary examples of real-life women whose behavior has been deemed so egregious as to put them beyond redemption: Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Jacobs, Valerie Solanas, Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Rihanna, and more. -VERDICT Well researched and intersectional, this unapologetically feminist critique of society's vicious treatment of women both famous and obscure who fail to conform to the expectations of normative straight, white femininity will appeal to readers of Jennifer L. Pozner's Reality Bites Back. [See "Editors' Fall Picks," p. 26.]-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.