Winding Down With True Crime
How did stories of dead and missing white women become our guilty pleasure?
There is not much that feels more leisurely to me than finishing a book on a Saturday morning and standing up to browse my stack of “to-be-read” books, cup of coffee in hand, the rest of an unplanned and unfilled weekend still stretching out before me. Thanks to my future father-in-law, whose ability to choose books for me is better than any algorithm, this stack is nearing a wobbly height. Yet what tempted me last Saturday was not the latest Jonathan Franzen or motherhood memoir on my shelf, but an unread Tana French mystery, snagged from one our neighborhood’s myriad Little Free Libraries.1 But I paused, remembering it had been only a few weeks since I last devoured a Tana French novel on vacation. I felt a familiar sense of guilt-induced restraint, the sort I feel when remembering I have already had a big bowl of ice cream for dessert the night before.
I had been feeling this sense for lingering guilt since last month, when I found myself inadverently toggling between multiple stories centered on missing white women. It came over me while I was listening to a podcast episode about the disappearance of Chandra Levy. It has become not unusual for me to listen to a fairly lurid podcast like this while exercising. Indeed, the lure of returning to a half-finished podcast episode is usually what convinces me to confine myself in the guestroom to sweat in the negligible pocket of time between the workday and dinnertime, and it’s not uncommon for me to try to retell to Ben, over dinner, a scandal or story that once fascinated the nation but about which neither of us knew very much. I have especially indulged in the trend of devouring repackaged-for-millennial-consumption tabloid stories like Chandra Levy’s, the details of which had failed to persist into the 21st century beyond a lasting association with the words “disappearance” or “murder.”
In listening to the episode about Chandra Levy, the story felt all too familiar. A bungled investigation. A public figure. Multiple deaths that no one had connected. I was also racing to finish JK Rowling’s most recent pseudonymous detective novel, this one a 900 page tome about a missing woman and the handful of other women possibly all killed by the same serial killer. Ben and I had just watched a documentary about an unsolved murder of a French woman in an Irish small town. But despite gorging myself on all of this murder, it was not until I registered, embarrasingly late, the parallels between the media frenzy of the summer of 2001 and still-unfolding media frenzy surrounding Gabby Petito, that I felt voyeuristic and icky. Aside from JK Rowling’s fictional victim, these were stories of real women, stories that I was using to chill out and escape my own life while tossing metaphorical popcorn into my mouth. Could it be that that in the last year, perhaps close to a third of my cultural consumption consisted of dead white girl content?
There was Mare of Easttown, which Ben and I devoured on Sunday evenings alongside Shandong dumplings. Before that there was The Investigation, the HBO scripted series based on the true story of a female journalist who went missing after interviewing a subject on a submarine in the sea between Denmark and Sweden. Before that (technically in 2020) there was I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, HBO’s adaptation of Michelle McNamara’s book about her investigation of the Golden State Killer, which becomes a meta-dead girl story with McNamara’s own death haunting the series. There were multi-series podcasts about Nicole Brown-Simpson and Princess Diana. There was Netflix which, knowing what we like, recommends entire rows of dead girl dramas, euphemistically categorized as “foreign detective thrillers” and “award-winning true crime documentaries.” Even the black comedy cultural phenomenon, White Lotus, threatens to become a dead girl story in its opening scene.
When I finish a dead-girl show, I find myself immediately craving more of the same type of content, event though I increasingly find it unsatisfying and hard to replicate . Netflix implores me to continue watching any number of Scandinavian true crime shows, abandoned halfway into the first episode because they centered around abused or murdered children, or because a bludgeoned nude female corpse features just a bit too prominently (I’m looking at you, Spiral).
I’m inclined to describe my recent devouring of what felt like the Impossible burger version of true crime. A missing man—and ultimately, a dead man—is technically at the center of the plot of Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, and yet, despite the plot’s suspense, finding out what happened to to the narrator’s estranged husband is not the primary plot arc. Kitamura writes with the narrative restraint of Rachel Cusk, the diffence being that Kitamura’s narrators are embodied, with their own interiority existing in the foreground. But the primary plotline in A Separation, as well as in her new novel, Intimacies, is interior. External plot seems to exist only to spur the narrator’s reckoning with, in A Separation, her failed marriage and ultimately-failed divorce—the separation that failed to be finalized before her husband disappeared and was found dead. The local Greek police are unhelpful, if not disinterested, in the murder. Kitamura’s story feels radical in part because uncovering the brutual force that desroyed the husband’s life and body is not what propels the story. Death is something to grapple with and react to, but not to solve.
A Separation lacks the archetypes of the dead girl story. Whereas A Separation is told through through the eyes of an estranged wife struggling to decide what responsibility she has, if any, to bother with her ex-husband’s death, the narrator of a usual dead girl story is the investigator—usually a detective, though sometimes a journalist or PI—through whose eyes we seek to discover what happened. Their personal lives are often in shambles as they, like us, become all-consumed, beyond the parameters of what is professionally appropriate, with solving the crime. I think of Michelle McNamara as the artechtypical all-consumed investigator, one who became a protagonist in her own right before becoming a victim herself. But McNamara, unlike many other protagonists, seeks to breathe life and substance into the dead girls she writes about.
The other archetype missing from A Separation is the character of the killer. Kitamura is not at all concerned with answering the question of “what happened,” let alone answering the question posed by most dead girl stories - the question of “how did this happen?” It says a lot about what we expect from men who purport to love women that the common twist in the dead girl story is when the murderer is someone other than the intimate partner. That is the “surprise” ending of the Chandra Levy story - that she wasn’t killed by the Congressman with whom she was involved, but instead was the victim of a random passerby in Rock Creek Park who had a thing for beating up female joggers. In A Separation, the reality of a randomly-inflicted, unsolved death is not a plot twist, but merely the plot. “Perhaps all deaths are unresolved,” she writes.
Like carbs, the proportion of my cultural diet comprised of dead girl content seems to rise with my psychic exhaustion. And I can’t deny that I was psychically exhausted for much of the last year, balancing the monotony of unceasing work-from-home with a sense that the world was ending. I turn to Tana French when I want to relax by easing into something all-consuming, when the paced unspooling of a mystery is the only thing that will help my frantic mind stop spinning over its own insignificant shit. Giving myself a good mystery is like giving my nippy puppy a chew toy that he is allowed to sink his teeth into.
I’m not yet sure if I’m trying to limit, or merely pace my consumption of stories centering on the disappearance and/or brutal murder/rape of white women. But I’m now consciously trying to ensure my cultural diet contains other things. This pacing takes restraint when our algorithmic culture makes it easy to exist entirely on the stories we like. Until sitting down to write this, this self-control, and the reasons behind it, existed mostly subconsciously. There is the limited amount of time that I have to read and watch television, and the fact that there are so many other books I’d like to read, books that give me more to think about and feel, and that there is so much more I’d like to learn. There is the fact that I’d like to spend a smaller percentage of time inhabiting the point-of-view of law enforcement, who are too frequently represented as the good guy protagonists in such stories. There is the fact that stories of dead white women are disproportionately represented in the culture, though women of color, and especially native women, experience violence and disppeareance at much higher rates.
Of course, solving a mystery and finding a killer is satisfying and ultimately simpler than preventing intimate partner violence or sex trafficking, or any of the problems that mkake my mind spin. Stories in which cops are good and justice is handed out satisfy a primal desire for accountability, if not retribution. But too often, we are not interested in these women until it is too late for them to be the protagonist of their own stories. They are memorialized—and thus survive—only in victimhood.
But I think I can still feel good about watching Lupin?
(For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tana French, she is a contemporary Irish crime mystery writer, though that description pigeonholes her into a genre generally not considered worthy of literary acclaim. Her writing is beautiful, her psychology incisive, and her plots masterfully woven. The prospect of savoring a gripping page-turner over a rainy weekend was tempting.)