4 Analyzing Life of the Party

Throughout Life of the Party, Olivia Gatwood uses her poems to wrestle with her ever-present fear of sexualized violence and transmit such to the reader. In the poem “My Grandmother Asks me Why I Don’t Trust Men” she recalls going on a jog with her dad. Her father runs ahead of her and leaves her alone on the trail when she runs into a coyote and expresses her relief that it is “just an animal” (Gatwood 2019:55). When she catches up to her dad she yells at him for leaving her alone and he questions her, asking “What are you afraid of?” and “Why are you so afraid?” (Gatwood 2019:55). In the next stanza, she does not reply directly to his question, instead questioning herself why she is “doing this– playing show and tell with the times I’ve walked fast / in the dark.” She suggests that maybe she is just tired “of hearing people talk about the murder / of girls like it is both beautiful / and out of the ordinary” (Gatwood 2019:56). In this statement she critiques the romanticization of sexualized violence in popular media, while also stating that she feels people do not acknowledge its regularity. In the last two stanzas of the poem she writes:

I ask the hotel attendant

to put me in a room near the elevator.

I listen to my best friend breathe

on the line while she walks home.

Sometimes I search “woman’s body found in”

when I visit a new city. Then I learn her name.

Her age. Where they found her– under a baseboard,

limbs folded in a closet. I learn her hobbies–

that she loved to sing. I watch the security footage

they discovered of her last moments, I watch her move

and breathe like the rest of us. I watch her look

over her shoulder three times

before walking out of view.

I know my fear better

than i know

my own body.  (Gatwood 2019: 56-57)

In these stanzas, Gatwood forces her reader to experience the viscerality and specificity of her fear. Utilizing a symbolic interactionist lense, we can understand how Gatwood’s self-perception as a person living under constant threat of sexualized violence dictates her actions (asking the hotel to put her by an elevator, staying on the phone while her friend walks home) as well as the way it encourages her to consume more media about the murder of women, which in turn perpetuates the fear (googling and actively seeking out stories of how women were harmed in a place she is about to visit). Gatwood examines her actions as an object separate from herself, and she engages in action based on her sense of her own positionality in the world. She is afraid of these acts of violence because of her lived experiences of violence, but also because in reading news articles or consuming media about crime, she identifies with the victim.

Gatwood reads “My Grandmother Asks me Why I Don’t Trust Men” 

Similarly, in the poem “Sound Bites While We Ponder Death,” Gatwood tells her lover that if she ever goes to park her car and doesn’t return in five minutes to go looking for her. She writes:

I read that [runningtrailsparkinggaragessouthcarolinabedroomsvacations} are the [sixthfourthsecondfirstninth] most common place for women to be murdered

is something I tell her often to statistically justify my need

for company in benign places.

Gatwood’s lover tries to reassure her that there are security cameras perched around the parking garage, to which Gatwood replies, “that won’t stop someone from murdering me … it’ll just tell you know did it.” Her lover argues that “maybe the fact that someone is watching will stop them,” and she responds that maybe it would but that she is “always stunned by the fearlessness of violent men” (76). Gatwood does not attribute her assertion (that the presence of cameras would not stop a man from murdering her) directly to crime media in this poem, but given the context of the book, the way security footage is utilized as a plot point in many programs, and the way she knows the particular statistics we can infer that this specific fear is the product of a cultural transmission.

Gatwood certainly knows that the majority of sexualized violence is committed by people you already know and are in relationship with (many poems reference fearing fathers/boyfriends etc. and she mentions this explicitly in the introduction), but much of the fear expressed throughout the book is centered in the violence committed by strangers and in the belief that this kind of random sexualized violence is incredibly common. As we know from the RAINN statistics people are assaulted by someone they already knew in approximately eight out of 10 cases, and that is consistent with murder (for example, of the women murdered in 2007, 64% were killed by a family member or intimate partner). However, this is not where the majority of her fear lies. This is consistent with Kathleen Custers and Jan Van den Bulck’s findings of “a culture of fear” (Yodanis qtd in Custers & Bulck 98) and with public opinion trends which show that since 1993 at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the generally downward trend in national violent and property crime rates during most of that period,” (Pew), as well as the Color of Change findings that white women are twice as likely to be portrayed as victims. The ever-increasing dramatization of violent crime in media (including news, tv and movies) undeniably contributes to this myth, and coupled with the real life experiences of violence Gatwood details, creates an unshakable sense of fear that is displaced onto the stranger.

Gatwood makes this explicitly connected to the production of crime media in the poem “Ode to My Favorite Murder.” My Favorite Murder is the name of a true crime podcast hosted by two women which has been extremely popular since 2016 and has popularized/normalized the idea of having “a favorite murder.” In the article “I am a murderino,” Jessica Hullinger explains the term murderino, which is the collective name the fanbase of the show uses to describe themselves. According to Hullinger, a murderino is  a “person with a borderline obsessive interest in true crime, and the specific nature and details of disturbing murders” (Hullinger 2016). She explains why they have this collective obsession, writing that:

Murder is awful and scary. But here’s the thing: It’s also really common. We all know people are killing other people all the time, and that we, too, could be murdered, but we have to carry on living our lives without being paralyzed by fear. And how do we do this? By talking about murder, when it happens, obsessively and informally with family and friends. Maybe we do this over dinner or drinks. Maybe in online forums. Wherever we do it, we don’t always care about the facts of the story or who was where at what specific time.  We want to indulge in the horror of it — become engrossed in the awful details, shake our heads in disbelief, and ultimately look for parallels in our own lives. (Hullinger 2016)

Hullinger’s articulation of why she obsesses over true crime clearly fits with the framework of cultivation theory as she believes murder is “really common,” when violent crime rates drop every year and murders constitute 0.7% of American deaths (Roser and Ritchie 2013). While this belief may not have been solely inspired by the media she consumes (i.e. she might have been drawn to it because it reaffirmed what she already believes) this media allows her to indulge in her fear. Through the lense of C Wright Mills and the sociological imagination we can understand how this large overarching structure of crime media and personal experience of fear co-construct eachother.

We can further see how women use true crime as a coping mechanism through the narrative of P.E. Moskowitz in her article “True Crime Is Cathartic for Women. It’s Also Cop Propaganda.” She describes how her obsession with true crime began after a near-death experience in Charlottesville, when she was 10 feet away from the white supremacist-driven car which drove through a crowd of protesters and killed Heather Heyer. After experiencing this incident, Moskowitz was “safe physically, but not mentally” (Moskowitz 2020) and fell in a deep downward spiral of fear. She describes how without realizing it her phone began to fill up with true-crime podcast episodes, the scarier the better and how “the point was to terrify myself as much as possible, in a controlled way” writing:

It took me a while to realize my trauma and newfound obsession were connected. True crime made me feel safe. My post-traumatic stress disorder had caused my brain to shoot out danger signals, making me feel as if something bad lurked around every corner. True crime was not a solution to my mental struggles; it was not therapy or meditation—it was more like taking a little Xanax. I could walk down the street, headphones in, a little calmer. It was as if, by listening to stories of murder, I was telling myself, “What you feel is real. Life really is this scary.” But because the stories weren’t my own I could distance myself from them. Sure, they were true, but they weren’t happening to me. (Moskowitz 2020)

Moskowitz’s narrative echos both Hullinger and Gatwood’s and explicates exactly why so many women and survivors of violence get attached to true crime media, as it allows them to validate their own fear and the trauma they’ve experienced while also distancing themselves from immediate harm.

Moskowitz’s search for the most terrifying true crime stories aligns directly with Gatwood’s poem “An Ode to My Favorite Murder,” where she asserts that her favorite murders are the ones that scare her and that she is able to project onto herself. She opens the poem with the line “my favorite murder is the one that makes me sleep in the living room, an open switchblade resting on a coaster” (Gatwood 2019:81). Later, she explicitly implicates her hunger “for a good story” (Gatwood 2019:82) and frames her fear as a film. She writes:

The movie I cast and direct

In line at the bank, the man behind me

wears no socks with his boat shoes

and auditions for the role of killer.

In this scene, he follows me to my car.

In this scene, he watches my lover

and me have sex. He waits four nights

to kill me. When I learned that rapists

can be identified by the flesh under their victims’

fingernails, I offered to scratch my boyfriend’s back.

I don’t know if that method works here

because I’m not alive to see it. (Gatwood 2019: 83)

While the obsession with stories of and media about murder often starts, as Hullinger and Moskowitz describe, as a coping mechanism from one’s fear, they also create such. As Gatwood states in her authors note, there is a tension in that the specific things she is afraid of are undoubtedly “shaped by the dozens of stories [she’d] read and watched that mirrored [her] phobia” and yet, “this media obsession of mine is simultaneously irrelevant because even without it, my fear had been validated over and over by very real, very tangible experiences” (Gatwood 2019: xi-xii). By collapsing her fear fantasy of this man at the bank with the implication of fear of her boyfriend, Gatwood implicates the way survivors attach to violent fantasies as an easier (albeit still horrifying) displacement of fear of the men in their intimate lives. While for Gatwood this does not take a political bent, it is consistent with what Lorna Bracewell found was driving women to conspiracy theories like QAnon– the existence of the dangerous outsider always functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, pain-killer, and threat” (Dworkin, 1983:34 qtd Bracewell 202`1:3).

Furthermore, throughout the book Gatwood investigates the media’s obsession and cultural production surrounding missing and murdered women, and the deep racial implications of such. For example, in the poem “Murder of a Little Beauty,” Gatwood crafts a piece borrowing language directly from People magazine’s 1997 coverage of the infamous JonBenet Ramsey murder. She writes, “little Miss Christmas dead in the basement / ripples of shock quickly spread through the nation … dab your eye, we know you like it gory / only the blondes get a cover story / girls go missing right around the corner / but she needs a tiara for us to mourn her / naturally attractive, exceptionally bright / how many ways can we say the word white?” (Gatwood 33). In this poem, Gatwood critiques the way media and our society at large only mourn those we find desirable and those whose lives are deemed valuable, namely beautiful, sympathetic white girls.

This is consistent across both news coverage and fictional media, as seen in the report “Normalizing Injustice” which found that “in the world of television, everyday people of color are generally perpetrators, not victims” (Color of Change 2020:7). As Custers and Bulck articulated, “violence laden drama shows who gets away with what, when, why, how and against whom.” (Custers and Bulck 2012:98). Thus clearly, an intersectional lense is necessary. This inability to see women of color as victims is clear in Gatwood’s parallel poem “Body Count: 13” which uses language from the Albuquerque Journal’s coverage of the murder of 11 Black and brown women, many of whom were sex workers. The poem begins, “we don’t believe anyone is a throwaway / just on the wrong side / of the law” (Gatwood 89). Throughout the poem, she appropriates the language which dismisses and downplays these womens’ lives because they were Black and Brown sex workers to critique it and “illuminate its coded language” (Strand Book Store 2019). Later in the poem she addresses this head-on writing, “imagine twelve white girls go missing / imagine their bodies found before they turn to bone / imagine their bodies found / how do I write a found poem / when there is nothing / to be found / how can I tell you / about a girl / who is defined / by her absence.” As discussed in my case study, women of color, especially Black and Indigenous women, are significantly more likely to be victims of sexualized violence, but the least likely to be portrayed as such in media (less than half as likely as white women in the Color of Change study). Furthermore, the Color of Change report illustrates how crime media often paints police as the heroes in stories about sexualized violence, when in reality more often they are the perpetrator or enabler, dismissing rape cases, abusing their wives, and killing Black women. Gatwood’s poems call out not only the blatant inequity in who is mourned by the media, but also in whose physical bodies are valued enough by the state to be searched for.

Gatwood engages an intersectional critique and the sociological gaze by analyzing these two drastically different media coverages and utilizes parallel poetic form to make the critique particularly impactful. These poems complicate Gatwood’s personal accounts of fear, as they are complicated by the way she is consistently able to identify herself with those who are searched for and made famous in death given her own positionality. In doing so, Gatwood simultaneously honors her own emotional experience of fear, while complicating it as a privilege.

Gatwood discussing the racial implications of True Crime and performing “Murder of a Little Beauty”