1 Introduction: Framing Olivia Gatwood’s Life of the Party

CW Discussion of Rape, Murder and Sexualized Violence

“In June in Boston, the sun rises at 5:10 am. I know this because one week, I stayed up every night until that exact minute. I can’t recall what I was up doing– maybe pacing my kitchen, moving between my couch and my bed, starting movies hoping I would fall asleep and then stopping them when I didn’t. I am not an insomniac. … My sleepless week, and the several more all-nighters between then and now, happened because I was afraid. I was afraid of something very specific: a man climbing through my first-floor apartment window, which realistically could have been popped open with a butter knife, and strangling me in my bed” (Gatwood 2019:xi).

This story of visceral and debilitating fear poignantly opens the 2019 poetry book Life of the Party, Olivia Gatwood’s debut collection which explores experiences of girlhood and the cultural obsession with violence against women, particularly in the form of true crime media. Gatwood frames her collection as a coming of age “memoir of [her] fear;” asking “how does a girl grow into a woman in a world racked by violence?” How does media about crime shape our understanding of our own victimhood/survivorship? (Gatwood 2019:Inside Cover). After describing this particular week-long fear of a break-in, she writes that it is both “important and irrelevant” (Gatwood 2019:xi) to note that she spent months leading up to that week consuming true crime media. Gatwood believes that this is important context because “my fear was shaped by the dozens of stories I’d read and watched that mirrored my phobia,” but also irrelevant because “even without it, my fear had been validated over and over by very real, very tangible experiences” (Gatwood 2019:xi-xii). She writes, “true crime taught me I am not the only one being devoured by this anxiety. And I am not the only one whose reaction is to consume as much true crime as possible,” (Gatwood 2019:xiii).

Unfortunately, like Gatwood, huge swaths of women (and non-women) live entire lives shaped by sexualized violence. Rape culture is the air we breathe. It not only affects us in moments of interpersonal harm, it also shapes the work we do in the world, the way we interact with our communities, and the way we interact with media. Like Gatwood and so many other femmes, I have spent an ungodly amount of my life having to grapple and contend with the fallout of sexualized violence, both my own experiences and those of my community. I too know Gatwood’s feeling of sleeplessness, and I too have utilized poetry to tell these stories, but unlike her, I have never had any interest in or habit of consuming true crime. This got me interested in exploring Gatwood’s work, using her poetry to understand how and why so many women/survivors consume true crime media.

Importantly, Gatwood notes in her introduction that while being a genre that so many look to for “contorted validation,” true crime is a genre largely produced by men which constantly perpetuates misogyny, racism and sexualized violence, “all of which is centered around one beloved dead girl” (Gatwood 2019:xiii). ˆLife of the Party asks and attempts to answer the question of, “what stake poetry has in this conversation”– not only the conversation which addresses the act of sexualized violence or how it manifests in paralyzing fear, but also in whose lives we value enough to mourn (Gatwood 2019:xiv). By utilizing poetry to combine her embodied experience of fear, her obsession with true crime media, and her critical analysis of how media represents sexualized violence, Gatwood engages the sociological imagination, giving us a window into the intersection of fear, patriarchy, and white supremacy.