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1 of 1 copy available
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 audiobook is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 20, 2016 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781524735753
- File size: 218548 KB
- Duration: 07:35:18
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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This intelligent audiobook is about the cruelty we heap on women celebrities whose misdeeds and even out-of-the-norm behavior are lambasted in the media. We find these women easy targets for hostility and judgment compared to men who are lionized for their misbehavior, even when it's destructive. Likable Alex McKenna is clearly engaged with the truth in narrating this author's message. McKenna has a rattle in her lower vocal register, but she's so effective and authentic that it quickly becomes irrelevant. This sweeping audio blends centuries-old examples and pop-culture figures to bring home the injustice of our puzzling ideals and anger toward women. Expertly written and performed, it's a wake-up call for us to examine the hidden assumptions and reflexes we have that unfairly denigrate women. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from July 18, 2016
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.
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