MANIC-DEPRESSIVE PIXIE DREAM GIRL

In her debut poetry collection, Zinn demolishes societal cliches of gender, trauma, and media.

Everyone knows the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She’s crazy, but in a sexy way; she rejects norms, but still feeds the male ego. She’s, of course, not like other girls. But according to the author, she is—or rather, she’s just a stack of real-life traumas and stigmas women face, wearing a trench coat (and purple hair) to be sold onscreen. The opener, “Pitching a More Honest Manic Pixie Dream Girl Movie,” reads like a recipe: Mix acoustic guitar, slow-rolling tears, a girl who “talks fast, swears often, laughs too loudly, and drops allusions to a hairpin trigger around unresolved issues with her father”; after a lengthy monologue, the “Sad Boy” lead will leave her. Zinn even includes notes about “ongoing litigation” regarding this trope’s prevalence, with references across the book’s five “acts” to offenders such as 500 Days of Summer, 13 Reasons Why, and Silver Linings Playbook. The author also considers real-life women who paved the way for the MPDG figure, such as Sylvia Plath (who died by suicide) and Zelda Fitzgerald (who perished in a fire at the sanitorium where she was committed). While burning cliches at the stake, Zinn illustrates the real, unglossed-over toll of mental illness and misogyny in a culture that either ignores or monetizes women’s pain, including what appear to be her own experiences, including the aftermath of a suicide attempt, the danger in rejecting a man you don’t like, endless disregard for one’s boundaries, the stigma of mental health diagnoses, and sexual assault. The book has acerbic moments of levity (such as an origin story for Chuck E. Cheese), but it’s clear that the author wants readers to sit in uncomfortable emotions and recognize the distance between how women suffer and the version of it marketed to the culture at large. Her thesis, in a nutshell: “Even through the barred windows / of the most secure psychiatric facilities, / the male gaze is still inescapable.”

A seething indictment of a culture obsessed with the pageantry of pain.