Gatwood - Life of the party: poems

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. It feels both important and irrelevant to tell you that I spent months before that week almost exclusively consuming true crime. Important because, yes, my fear was shaped by the dozens of stories Id read and watched that mirrored my phobia, stories that showcased how common and easy it is to murder a girl. One could argue (many did) that had I not read those stories, I would not have kept all of my windows closed in the middle of the summer in an apartment without air-conditioning. 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. There was the first time I lived alone, at eighteen, when a stranger saw me on the street, figured out my address, and left notes on my door insisting that we belonged together.

There was the man who tried to pry open my roommates window with a crowbar while she slept. The man who sat in the back of my show and laughed every time I talked about womens deaths. The man who forced open my car door in my driveway and climbed on top of me as I tried to get out. The American boys in another country who placed bets on who would sleep with me first while they walked me home, how I left them on a street corner in the middle of the night so they wouldnt know where I was staying. And there were all of the men before, between, and after thatmen whose names I know, men I loved and trustedwho violated my body, the bodies of my friends, the bodies of their daughters, and, Im certain, the bodies of countless women I do not know. People often tell me that I spend too much time being afraid of something that is statistically less likely than a car crash.

But every time I read the news, I am pummeled by stories of missing girls, murdered girls, women killed by their revenge-seeking former boyfriends, and it becomes increasingly difficult to call the murder of women rare. It is impossible to call my fear irrational. I want to believe that the motivation behind most true crime is to bring to light the epidemic of womens murder worldwide, to use nonfiction storytelling as a method of illuminating a clear pattern. But I dont believe that. If that were true, it wouldnt focus on crimes committed by random strangers, and instead would reveal the much more common perpetrators: men whom these women knew and often loved. If true crime were truly mission-oriented, it would focus on the cases that are not explicitly perverse and shocking, the ones that are familiar, fast, and happen at home.

If true crime sought to confront the reality of violence against women, it would not rely so heavily on fear-mongering narratives of cisgender white girls falling victim to men of color. Instead, it would acknowledge that indigenous women experience the highest rates of homicide, often at the hands of white men. It would depict the stories of the several transgender women murdered each month, or the countless black, brown, and indigenous women who have gone missing without so much as an investigation. The language of true crime is codedit tells us our degree of mourning is contingent on the victims story. While students and athletes are often remembered for their accolades and looks, sex workers or women who struggled with addiction are reduced to those identities as a justification for the violence committed against themif their stories are even covered at all. The truth is: It is a privilege to have your body looked for.

True crime, while being a genre that so many women rely on for contorted validation, is, simultaneously, a perpetuator of misogyny, racism, and sexualized violenceall of which is centered around one, beloved, dead girl. It is a genre primarily produced by men. A genre that complicates how we bond over our love for it, often unsure of who identifies with the victim and who identifies with the perpetrator. I found true crime because of my fear. A fear that, for so long, felt absurd and loud and wholly my own. True crime taught me that 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 possibleto fuel and fight it at once. But the true crime I want is written by women. The true crime I want moves beyond the star athlete. I want the stories that honor girls, not sensationalize them. The true crime I want knows that more than half of the women murdered worldwide are killed by their partners or family members. The true crime I want does not celebrate police or prison as a final act of justice, but recognizes these systems as perpetrators toodefective, corrupt, and complicit in the same violence that they prosecute.

As an avid consumer of true crime in all genresshort stories, documentaries, podcasts, television showsand as a writer myself, I began to wonder what stake poetry has in that conversation. What happens when we look at the phenomenon of our obsession with homicide and we say, This is how this makes me feel. This is what this does to me at night. I want to look beyond true crime to understand why I feel the way I do. I want to look at my own life, at the lives of women I love, women Ive lost, women in my community and beyond, and begin to understand that the fear inside me is a product of simply being alive. Yes, I am terrified of being murdered. I am terrified that a man who threatened me on the Internet will come to one of my shows with a gun.

I am terrified of rejecting men harshly because of the backlash that comes with it. I am not terrified because true crime told me to be, I am terrified because I have been here long enough to know I should be. This feeling dictates the ways I move: in parking garages, at bars, in my own house. And I have grown to know this feeling so intimately that I also experience a need to protect itto understand where it was born, to name it, and to say it out loud. This is a book of poems about true crime. It is also a book of poems about the many small violences a person can withstand.