8 teen girls walk into a boxing club in Reno
Monday reading #41
Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about something I have read. Sometimes it is about television or food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!
I read Rita Bullwinkel’s novel Headshot over the weekend and was so dazzled and drawn in that I tried to finish it in one setting. (I finished it in two, whatever.) I just loved it and I think you will, too. Thank you to whoever recommended it to me—I’d forgotten I’d put it on reserve at the library and what it was even about.
The plot is just what the subject line up there says: Headshot takes place over two days at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada, where eight girls are competing for the Daughters of America Cup. That’s it. That’s the plot.
But it also hardly describes what this book does, which is mine the inner lives of each of these girls as they fight one another, a combination of close third person that narrates what they think and feel in the ring and omniscient third that telescopes out to different places and times and tells us where they’ll go. The physicality is intense and even surprising, especially because I wouldn’t call it—a book about boxing—a violent book: Bullwinkel describes hits as “touches,” a choice that somehow doesn’t detract from the narrative proximity to their bodies. A couple of them are also feral weirdos, which I love. (Rachel is my favorite.) The chapters are also layered with short snippets—jumping back and forth in time, in perspective, intermixed with other observations like this one:
Nobody can ever know what a specific body is good at unless they’re inside it.
Or this:
The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.
Bullwinkel also does really wonderful work with description. I once read a craft essay Eileen Myles wrote, in which they say “Use your voice like a camera and go,” and that’s what happens here—Bullwinkel’s eye is both unsparing and frames the miraculous and ecstatic in this quotidian setting:
The parents, and the coaches, and the piecemeal off-white, ramshackle chorus of men that the Daughters of America tournament has designated as judges, all of them are dull around the edges in a way that glares compared with the searing radiance of these girl fighters.
I saved so many favorite passages that it would be a little silly to share all of them, but I hope you’ll go find them yourself.
Talk soon!
PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”