Trainwreck

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.

How and why women are alternately idolized and then given hell for being the way they are.Doyle examines society's fascination with powerful and/or successful females who suddenly go off-kilter, becoming someone or doing something that is not in tune with how they had acted before. Nicki Minaj, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Paris Hilton, and many more modern women are well-known in the media for their occasionally wild antics, and Doyle studies the buildup of their celebrity status and their crashing downfalls. She also goes back in time to the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, who was more famous in her day for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for her books, or Billie Holiday, who broke all sorts of barriers and is equally known for her heroin addiction as for her music. As the author notes, a "trainwreck" is "not just the cost of sharing the wrong things, or of being Visible While Female. She's a signpost pointing to what 'wrong' is, which boundaries we're currently placing on femininity, which stories we'll allow women to have....And, in her consistent violation of the accepted social codes--her ability to shock, to horrify, to upset, to draw down loud and powerful condemnation--she is a tremendously powerful force of cultural subversion." But it is society's fascination with all women, not just the celebrities, and the effect and pressures women constantly face that form the crux of Doyle's shrewd narrative. Throughout, she shows how any woman, thanks to the internet and especially social media, can now become an object of unwanted scrutiny. Fortunately, Doyle offers methods for women to fend off the endless observation, policing, and judgments, all of which are part of life for most women. A well-rounded, thoughtful analysis of what can make and break a woman when she's placed in the spotlight. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 1, 2016

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2016
What do Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, and Monica Lewinsky have in common? Journalist Doyle, who writes for Rookie and In These Times, argues that they've all been casually categorized, at one point or another, as trainwrecks. Summed up as suffering from, and publicly humiliated for, sexual overabundance, emotional overabundance, all the too-muchness and too-bigness that comes with being a flaming wreck of a woman, these and other women provide a lens for understanding society's prevailing reactions to, and treatment of, them. Canny and conversational, Doyle draws compelling parallels to trainwrecks modern readers might have missed: Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Jacobs, Theroigne de Mericourt. Doyle's dismantling of the trainwreck-inspired media circus is a wreck in itself: difficult to see and hard to look away from. Making her point most pertinently in the case of public figures, 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)