photograph courtesy alice bolin
Author Alice Bolin
Alice Bolin’s 2018 collection Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving America’s Obsession, which The New York Times Book Review called “stylish and inspired,” captured the mood of its moment in what we now remember as a simpler time.
In 2018, before Covid and generative AI and talk of tariffs and trade wars, seemingly every novel on a bestseller list featured a girl (or woman) in peril (or recently deceased) — think Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Bolin’s well-timed and clever dissection of America’s fascination with violence against women racked up awards from Kirkus, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Thrillist, Bustle, and others.
Now, the Anthony and Edgar Awards nominee is back with a new collection of essays, Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse (Mariner/HarperCollins). Examining “the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age,” the book releases on June 3rd.
From Poetry to Joan Didion
By her own admission, Bolin took a “circuitous” route to her current career as a nonfiction writer. “I took a poetry class randomly, to fill an art credit,” Bolin explains over a phone interview that feels, in tone, more like a meandering and beguiling coffee-fueled chat about the precarious state of the nation and its media.
Though the author had initially set out to study history and political science, poetry quickly became an all-encompassing obsession for Bolin. So she pivoted, and went to graduate school for poetry. How, though, does an undergraduate degree in history and an MFA in poetry lead one to incisive essays about the intersection of femininity and pop culture? Circuitously.
The internet, Bolin contends, is a revelatory invention, but the way we, as users, interact with it, even 25 years into the twenty-first century, still seems predicated on twentieth-century values. Will there be a break from the past? “Maybe we’ll look back and say, ‘Oh, that was the moment,’” the author muses.
Bolin didn’t begin writing nonfiction until she graduated with her MFA. In fact, it was her first contact with a different — and much acclaimed — essay collection that precipitated another change in direction for her. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, an excellent 1968 essay collection that primarily catalogues Didion’s experiences in California, inspired Bolin to move to Los Angeles and experiment with writing place-based nonfiction essays.
“That was the moment when I understood the kind of writer I wanted to be,” she says. “It was a huge influence on my first book.”
California left its mark on the Idaho-born Bolin’s Dead Girls. “Dead-girl shows,” as the writer calls them — television programs that hinge on the disappearance of a teenage beauty queen or the like — are often set in L.A., as is much of the work of hardboiled crime writer Raymond Chandler. In fact, it seemed that the United States had, across different mediums, something of an obsession with dead girls. So, from Twin Peaks to L.A. noir to the bloom of true crime as a subgenre, Bolin’s Dead Girls is “about crime, feminism, and the American West,” the author says.
Notes from the Bluff City
Bolin’s career eventually brought her to Memphis, where she taught creative nonfiction writing at the University of Memphis.
“There are so many things I feel like I’m still reckoning with or thinking about,” Bolin remembers. “Memphis means so much to me, and to my husband, who is a musician.” The writer says that some of her Memphis memories exist in a haze of pandemic-induced murk, but, that being said, she mentions a few that possess the undeniable sheen of Memphis’ unique magic. She met and befriended Memphis-based poet Caki Wilkinson while living and working in the Bluff City, and Bolin and her husband were married at the courthouse in Memphis. Still, though she wrote the bulk of her forthcoming essay collection while in Memphis, the writer says the city’s influences on the work were more circumspect.
“My friendships and my experience at the university really influenced the book, but I don’t think that a person reading it would know. This one is a lot less about place and a lot more about the online space and the internet,” Bolin admits.
Digital Data and Material Girls
Culture Creep is, in its own way, as much a work defined by a specific setting as Dead Girls, but that setting is a non-place instead of a location. Rather than focusing on the crimes, both real and fictional, of sunny California, Bolin instead dredges up the dark underbelly of the World Wide Web. And, surprising as that may seem, that aforementioned darkness is as present in work-out apps and cute animal-themed video games as in more unsavory digital spaces.
“I have a few pieces about YouTube and beauty YouTube and the influencer market,” Bolin says, by way of teasing out one of the collection’s recurring threads. The book compares the online influencer realm to teen magazines and women’s magazines. Bolin calls the latter a “disseminating factor of marketing and trends” and examines their sphere of influence and how it’s changed since the advent of social media. Regardless of the medium, the entire beauty industry seeks to control how women and girls conceive of their bodies — and, of course, to capitalize on those views.
Where consumers pay for magazines, however, we often give up access to our private data just to participate in social media, often to the lucrative benefit of the companies profiting off ad sales and data profile models. Bolin draws another parallel by inviting readers to consider exercise tracking apps and the like, suggesting that such app users conceptualize the body through technology. Therefore, that technology is instrumental in our own awareness of our bodies. In order to participate, Bolin explains, we sell our data — even our health data, something that ostensibly should be private — and the author wonders why we submit so willingly to that level of surveillance.
“It essentially turns us all into products to be bought and sold. The ‘personal brand’ is the perfect example of that,” Bolin says, referencing the curated online image most social media users cultivate. “A bigger question to me is why we willingly sell ourselves, and sell ourselves so short.”
Capitalism and commerce, Bolin suggests, is a framing device for almost all digital interactions. Like so many other homebound individuals in search of comfort, Bolin found herself playing Animal Crossing during the pandemic. “So much of the activity [in the game] really is just shopping,” Bolin laughs, “and within the game that stands in for happiness.”
The internet, Bolin contends, is a revelatory invention, but the way we, as users, interact with it, even 25 years into the twenty-first century, still seems predicated on twentieth-century values. Will there be a break from the past? “Maybe we’ll look back and say, ‘Oh, that was the moment,’” the author muses.
Until that cultural awakening comes, Bolin says, “It feels like we’re living in this future that feels like the past.”
