Bingo Row 5 – borrow
I got it from the library.
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe opens and closes with a rich lady from Chicago. Although one was heiress rich and wanted crimes to be solved and the other was horse riding lessons rich and wanted to be a famous mass shooter; they weren’t really in the same social bracket or true crime fangirl bracket. But I thought they made good bookends.
I always enjoy things about true crime as a genre. Savage Appetites felt like an indulgent true crime think piece from a pop intellectual website spread out over a few hundred pages.
Thanks to my fondness for these think pieces, I was pretty familiar with Monroe’s premise. Women liking true crime makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Is it because it’s voyeuristic? Feminist? Because true crime fascination shies away from the marginalized? (The answer to these questions is ‘sometimes.’)
The book focuses on four example archetypes of the woman obsessed with true crime.
The detective – Frances Glessner who helped forensic science by being a rich woman who acted like having money made her right.
The victim – The women who infested Sharon Tate’s family by posing as the reincarnation/baby of Sharon, by living in her house, by befriending them… it made me grimace a few times.
The defender – a successful landscape architect who falls in love with a man on death row via a video at MoMA. With help from Pearl Jam and other celebrities, it seems to work out for them.
The killer. This one made me quite uncomfortable. A biracial white supremacist in the Tumblr Columbine shooter fandom plots a shooting with her boyfriend. I also learned a new word – hybristophilia.
So what’s wrong or right with women liking true crime? Ultimately those questions are too reductive. There are too many women and too many ways for true crime obsession to manifest for those questions to be answered.