“Savage Appetites” by Rachel Monroe
You know when someone is such a delightful writer that it should objectively flood you with torrents of bile and inextinguishable malice towards them? Rachel Monroe is that sort of writer for me, but I can’t bring myself to wish ill upon her because I don’t want her to experience any roadblocks to producing more stories. She wrote the definitive piece on the scam of essential oils! And the most true thing I’ve ever come across on the psychotic vim of teenage crushes! She’s also a firefighter, which is so cool that honestly really should upset me. I wrote a bit about her new book Savage Appetites in an essay for The Ringer about why people are still so obsessed with Charles Manson, but I want to recommend it now, because it is coming out soon.
(But first, an aside on firefighting. Did you know that the FDNY has an age limit to becoming a new firefighter, and that age limit is TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD? A little while ago I went through an intense bout of despair over the state of my career, as one does, and I was ruminating on how I could fix my stupid future and decided that the answer was “become firefighter.” But then I got way more despondent over my whole situation when I discovered I am officially too old to qualify, that I have forever squandered my chance to vroom around on the big red truck and vanquish arsonists and bump fists with my bros in the firehouse before retreating to the break room to work on my novel whilst being compensated quite handsomely in taxpayer dollars. This has nothing to do with books, it’s just fucked up and they should raise the age limit and let me become a firefighter.) (Also I’m happy again.)
Anyways, Savage Appetites. Monroe has written about crime as a magazine journalist for many years, and her book takes a meta approach, examining tropes within the world of true crime—the concept of victimhood, the enigmatic killer, the dogged detective, and the weirdly giddy and overwhelmingly female world of true crime fandom, etc. There’s an incredible chapter on Frances Glessner Lee, a turn-of-the-century socialite who became a pioneer of forensics, and an even more incredible chapter on the saga of Lorri Davis and Damien Echols, who fell in love after Davis saw a documentary about Echols’ imprisonment as one of the “West Memphis Three” and decided to free him.
As a woman who consumes a lot of true crime, I’ve given some thought over the years to why I gravitate towards it, and my conclusions haven’t been especially flattering. There are about a million essays out there rationalizing this particular interest as a way that women deal with trauma or cope with a world that wants to hurt them, and I don’t doubt that this is the case for some members of this audience. But my interest, alas, probably boils down to curiosity and a tendency to rubberneck. Monroe also dwells on this question. “Perhaps we like creepy stories because something creepy was in us,” she hypothesizes—thank God! By opening Savage Appetites by admitting that it does tap something dark and weird within us, Monroe grounds the book in a bluntly honest perspective that is often missing in discussions of the genre. “Sensational crime stories can have an anaesthetizing effect—think of those TV binge-fests, or late nights spent tumbling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole—but we don’t have to use them to turn our brains off,” she writes. “Instead we can use them as opportunities to be more honest about our appetites—and curious about them, too. I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.”
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Speaking of appetites….I must briefly note the large adult appetite of a great writer and an even greater person. Jia Tolentino’s book, Trick Mirror, obviously rules and I’m going to assume you have purchased it already. (If not...what are you doing, where have you been, etc.?) But what I want to draw your attention to is her Grub Street Diet from earlier this month. It is metal, and inspirational, and I will be returning to it whenever I even briefly entertain the notion of doing Whole 30 or some other nonsense again because everyone’s life deserves this level of gusto.
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And finally, on the subject of appetites and gusto for life, I gotta share a Los Angeles Times story by the writer Deborah Netburn. It’s about a retired teacher named Rog Hanson who is now what can only be described as a “sea horse whisperer” and it made me tear up because I was just so happy for him. Hanson spends his days tending to a Pacific seahorse colony off the shores of Long Beach, and has become an expert on the creatures simply by loving them so much. “Hanson is a retired schoolteacher, not a scientist, but experts say he probably has spent more time with Pacific seahorses, also known as Hippocampus ingens, than anyone on Earth,” Netburn writes. Hanson swears visitors to the seahorse sites to secrecy for their protection, but the 68-year-old treks to visit them once or twice a week, keeping a meticulous log of his findings. Scientists think he may help them uncover new information about how long this species lives, and researchers do not have a good estimate of its lifespan. I yearn to SCUBA with this man.