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sunshine jen: Bad Girls Don't Cry
There is a new anthology out called Bad Girls. The cover is a white background with big red lips and Bad Girls written in gold over them. The editor of the anthology was doing a bookstore reading, so I decided to go.
I was hoping for some literary chick smackdown. Come girls, let's be bad and take down the male literary establishment. Let's burn down all those boy writer structures. No, I don't mean actual arson. I'm talking in metaphor.
So I was expecting the sisterhood rising like the Phoenix. I was at least hoping for stories of murder. Girl gone wrong kills her son and puts his head on a spike. Girl gone wrong gets her brother to murder their mother. Girl gone wrong kills her sons and serves them to her lying cheating man who would be no where without her or the golden fleece. Literature has tons of bad girls, and now we women were gonna take them back. We were gonna make them shine.
Well, the reading didn't quite happen that way.
The editor read her story, an anecdote really, about running naked out into the ocean while at the house of her ex-husband's business associate. Okay, that was nice. She obviously didn't drown.
She went on to talk about other bad behaviors in the book. What she described didn't sound like badness. It sounded like partying. In fact, there was no shock value to me at all. Talk of threesomes and crazy drunken orgies kind of came off as bragging. Was there any other reason to tell such a story and what does such telling say about the teller?
I was most unimpressed. I felt like I was watching the worst kind of flirt–-the tease. Teases never deliver what they hint they might have underneath their clothes.
So I didn't buy the book. I know it's mean to slam a book I haven't read. Maybe I'm just slamming the experience of the promotional reading of the book I haven't read. Gosh, I'm such a bad girl.
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