Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why

Sady Doyle

Melville House (2016)

Rating: ★★★★★

Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Women's Studies, Popular Culture

Social Sciencettt Feminism & Feminist Theoryttt Women's Studiesttt Popular Culturettt

She’s everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck. 
She’s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying, “crack is whack,” and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself. 

From Mary Wollstonecraft—who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for 
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
—to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle’s 
Trainwreck
 dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to “behave.”
Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Sady Doyle’s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.

**

Review

“Smart ... compelling ... persuasive ... Doyle reminds us that we shouldn't be so quick to judge women in terms of degrading stereotypes or unrealistic expectations.”*
—
New York Times Book Review

“Fantastic...
Trainwreck
will very likely join the feminist canon.”
*
—The Atlantic

“Fiercely brilliant, must-read...Doyle has dug deeply into the garbage that the media peddles about women...Doyle's book moves the needle.”*
—
Elle

“Provocative, persuasive.”
—Vogue
*
“To miss
Trainwreck
would be a mistake...Brilliantly snarky and smart,
Trainwreck
deserves a place on every savvy woman's bookshelf.”
*—Bust Magazine
*
*
“A deeply researched account of our culture’s misogynistic obsession with trainwrecks...A convincing, compulsively readable polemic,
Trainwreck
hinges on the argument that normalizing hatred toward famous women sets a precedent for hating
any
woman: If you build it, the trolls will come.”—The Portland Mercury

“A dazzling compendium of iconic feminist figures...The transhistorical connections between women are delightful, and Doyle showcases the breadth and depth of her knowledge as she moves with ease from Tara Reid to Hillary Clinton to Britney Spears to Marie Antoinette...However, where
Trainwreck* truly illuminates its readers is in its social and psychological reflections about origins of the narrative.”
—Salon**

“Smart, funny, and fearless.”
*
—The Boston Globe

“A ruthlessly funny, smart, and relentlessly on-point takedown of modern misogyny….Doyle’s debut book places her on the A-list of contemporary feminist writers.”
—
Publishers Weekly
starred review
“Doyle shows the way women in general have been, and very often still are, tried for their very womanness, devoured for their flaws, and respected only once they've been reduced to smoldering ash. High-speed and immediately readable, Doyle's poignant take on the concept of the trainwreck, and its relation to feminism, will provoke much thought and discussion.”
—
Booklist 
*starred review
 
“Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture; Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete. Trainwreck* is a blistering indictment of how history has normalized sexism as entertainment, defining—and destroying—the women we claim to love.” —Andi Zeisler, author of *We Were Feminists Once

“Sady Doyle’s wise, funny, bleak-when-it-needs-to-be voice has long been indispensable. With 
Trainwreck*, she brilliantly connects the dots on the women our society likes to chew up and spit out. We need this book.” 
—
Irin Carmon, co-author of the
*New York Times
bestseller
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“Sady Doyle is audaciously funny and relentlessly fearless. I am amazed by her ability to hold contentious but vital feminist lines long after the rest of us have fled the war to hide under the covers. The supposed ‘trainwrecks’ of history (and the future) couldn’t hope for a more clear-eyed, steadfast champion.” 
—Lindy West, author of *Shrill

“Sady Doyle is a wonder. She writes personally about the political and politically about the personal in a way that makes both worth reading. She’s also incisive, surprising, and funny as hell.” 
—Clay Shirky, author of *Here Comes Everybody
*

“Sady Doyle is more than a writer, she’s a force of nature—a mostly-benevolent one, like a cleansing forest fire that makes way for new growth. Her clear-eyed criticism, finely tuned prose, and always-questioning outlook combine to make hers one of the most necessary voices of our time. Plus she is very funny.”
—Emily Gould, author of 
Friendship
“Sady Doyle is simply one of the smartest, funniest, most humane writers working today. In a time of too many takes, I always look forward to hers. If you agree with her, reading her work is cathartic; and if you don’t, take cover.” —Kate Harding, author of 
Asking for It

About the Author

Sady Doyle founded the blog Tiger Beatdown in 2008. Her work has appeared in
In These Times
, 
The Guardian
, Elle.com, 
The Atlantic,
 Slate, Buzzfeed, Rookie, and lots of other places around the Internet. She won the first-ever Women’s Media Center Social Media award by popular vote in 2011 and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 
Trainwreck
 is her first book. 

TRAINWRECK

Copyright © 2016 by Sady Doyle

First Melville House Printing: September 2016

Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

and

8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT

mhpbooks.com
        
facebook.com/mhpbooks
        
@melvillehouse

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-564-3

Design by Marina Drukman

v3.1

And if I am to speak of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short admonition: To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or for evil among men.

—PERICLES
, Funeral Oration

Q: What’s the difference between Amy Winehouse and Amy Winehouse jokes?

A: The jokes will get old.

—Jokes4Us.com

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Preface: Our Trainwrecks, Ourselves

Part I
THE TRAINWRECK: HER CRIMES

1. Sex

2. Need

3. Madness

4. Death

Part II
THE TRAINWRECK: HER OPTIONS

5. Shut Up

6. Speak Up

Part III
THE TRAINWRECK: HER ROLE

7. Scapegoat

8. Revolutionary

Conclusion: The View from the Tracks

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

PREFACE

OUR TRAINWRECKS, OURSELVES

She’s everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck.

An actress known for light, bubbly romantic comedies and teen dramas throws a bong out of a thirty-sixth-floor window, to the dismay of assembled police officers. Her neighbors tell the press that she’s been talking to herself, and that they suspect a psychotic break. A timeline of her “meltdown” appears on
Jezebel
. Late-night comedians have grist for months.

A reality-TV star appears on the cover of
Vogue
, causing massive backlash and speculation as to whether the magazine has “killed” its prestigious brand. The woman is rumored to have leaked her own sex tape. She once accepted thousands of dollars to accompany a wealthy man on a date. In the
Vogue
issue in question, she’s posing with her
fiancé and newborn child. Readers threaten to boycott the publication.

An actress’s “fuck list,” naming every man she’s slept with, is circulated in advance of her upcoming reality series.

A musician’s “fuck list,” naming every man she’s thought to have dated, is printed up in Helvetica font and sold as a T-shirt online.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her apartment.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her hotel bathtub.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship remains under her father’s conservatorship due to mental incompetency. Ticket sales for her Las Vegas shows are through the roof.

It’s easy to look at these women and see what they did wrong, tally up their sins and errors: insensitive, provocative, promiscuous, off-the-wagon, crazy. It’s easy to tell yourself,
this is not my story
. But I’d wager good, hard money that, if you got the chance to speak to any of these women, they’d tell you that these are not their stories, either.

The privilege of controlling your own narrative is easy to take for granted. It’s easy to confuse for a right; to assume that, of all the people in this loud and crowded world, you’re the person best suited to tell the world who you are,
or what you are, or what your actions and emotions mean in context.

Yet we know that narratives can be stolen, and weaponized. We’ve seen it happen again and again. Say the words “celebrity trainwreck,” and the image immediately appears: young, pretty, most likely blond, and in some degree of high-gloss disarray, pinned between the club and the door of her limousine by a wall of flashing cameras. She’s drunk, or she’s high, or she’s naked, or she’s crying—or she will be, anyway, by the end of the night. The cameras are there to testify to her impending doom. They’re there so we can watch it happen. Hence the etymology, actually—just as people are supposedly unable to avoid staring at a gruesome wreck on the highway, you know that this person is going to suffer, horribly, exceptionally, and you won’t look away, because you enjoy it. The theft of narrative is where this begins, because, on some level, becoming a trainwreck simply means that the public assumes the right to control how you can define yourself: Kim Kardashian, for example, cannot be both the star of a sex tape and a blushing bride on the cover of
Vogue
. We’ll mock and scorn her for being the one, but flat-out punish her and
Vogue
both if she attempts to be the other. It also means losing authority over your own decisions. Some lose that authority literally, by being put in jail or in hospitals or under the conservatorship of their parents, but more often, it’s simply a matter of establishing them as “troubled”; as “out of control”; as people who don’t know how to live their own lives.