Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

It’s another case of destructive masculinity requiring both one’s self and one’s enemy to be larger than life.

a dream nemesis who is inevitably a reflection of themselves.

There is something enlightening here about our understanding of the abstraction “crime” encompassing both the process of committing a crime and the process of solving

“There’s very good reason I don’t see many women investigators on cases like this. It’s not natural.” Then why is it natural for male investigators?

He views crime as a natural phenomenon, like a weather pattern, which comes and goes in streaks like seasons, and the serial killer as a pure “bad guy” whose habits are too dark and powerful to be conceived of:

it mystifies the killer in ways that are not only counterproductive but also insidious.

reflecting the Freudian model of existence that, according to Nelson, “turns our lives into detective stories; our innermost selves, into culprits.”

She had the impulse to ask her professor “whether women were somehow always already dead,

or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.”