Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

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

The first is that girls are wild, vulnerable creatures who need to be protected from the power of their own sexualities.

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

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

making the question not “What have I done?” but “What happened to me?” Nonetheless, memory and the self are presented as riddles to be solved.

a dream nemesis who is inevitably a reflection of themselves.

the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.

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

Domestic violence is one of the strongest indicators of future mass violence,