#A 13yr old girl strangling girls her mother took an interest in and using their teeth for her dollhouse. My god

[madqueenalanna]

i just read sharp objects and i want to talk about it but like where to even START

in the back of my mind i am percolating a comparison between gillian flynn and vc andrews, which might not make sense to anyone but me. the generational trauma, the behind-closed-doors horror, the power in sexuality. vc andrews wrote about the unique, indescribable rage experienced by teenage girls exploring their bodies and sexuality in a deeply patriarchal society; gillian flynn writes about women in their 30s, those abused and angry girls all grown up and dangerous. both an exploration of a facet of women's inner lives that feels very difficult to explain and which is rarely explored in other media

anyway wow the generational trauma. joya abused adora, who became a teen mother and abused all three of her daughters. when amma was born, camille was about the same age that adora was when camille was born, and there's this weird sister-child-friend-enemy dynamic camille has with amma. none of them ever learned how to love each other, or themselves. camille turned her anger inward and destroyed her body; adora poisoned marian her whole life and finally killed her; amma mutilated the bodies of her classmates for her dollhouse. what the fuck is even going ON with these people

i still need to read dark places but between gone girl and sharp objects, i am fascinated by gillian flynn's take on these adult women's sexuality. amy does not seem to enjoy sex much at all except for the power it gives her over men; she thinks derisively about nick's desire, desi's, the appeal of girls like andie; she (and camille) talks about sex in kind of a clinical, detached way, the smell, the stickiness, this very open and raw but entirely un-sexy way. camille blames herself for being gang-raped at fourteen while drunk, but locks her various traumas so deep that even thinking about the event sounds like she's talking about someone else (and to willis, she is). sex is power and control, it's about using other people by letting them use you. it's gross. it's intimate. as someone with some... issues around sex, myself, i could see why it would rub people the wrong way but i found it oddly refreshing, in the way i find gallows humor to be funny

gillian flynn said in an ama that she wrote sharp objects as an exploration of female generational violence, a subject considerably less explored than male cyclical violence (no one is writing the all-woman atreus house, for example). her protagonists are ruthless, crass, secretive, kind of cold, unflinching in the face of monstrosity. amy notices that nick's hands still smell like andie after a hookup and thinks "she must have one rank pussy"; camille carves the word "clit" on herself and only later changes it to "cAt". vulnerability might exist for them, but it's buried so far down that even first-person narration can barely touch it

i feel like it's rare to see female protagonists like these that aren't given much justification or redemption and that aren't... i don't know, given masculine traits? like how in movies, women only know about cars bc they have five brothers, and they prove they're "cool" by having lots of sex, drinking heavily, always being "game" i mean god i'm so sick of it all. run cool_girl_monologue.exe. the violence that women do to each other and themselves can be horrific on its own. i don't think you could gender-swap these stories and change nothing else, they're about WOMEN

anyway gone girl was already one of my favorite books and sharp objects was unreal good, i need to watch the miniseries and read dark places