Book: A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
Story: “The Hustlers at Scores” by Jessica Pressler
Secondary Reading: “Why are women so successful as con artists?” by Tori Telfer for Crime Reads and “Gillian Flynn Reflects on ‘Gone Girl’ Legacy and the Growing Appetite for Anti-Heroines in Books”
*Heads up/trigger warning: This month’s newsletter talks a lot about murder, killing, psychopathy, and cannibalism. If you don’t like that, don’t read! (There’s also some light spoilers for the book.)
Not to be dramatic, but A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers was probably one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. I don’t know what exactly it says about me that my favorite book of the year is about a female psychopath who meticulously murders her lovers and then eats a specific part of their body in a lavish meal, but as my roommate would say: “I do support women’s wrongs.”
And honestly, for the last few years (and especially this past year), we’ve all been obsessed with women who wrong. They come to us as murderesses psychopaths, sociopaths, serial killers, and especially con-women. Outwardly, we gawk at these fallen Madonnas, wide-eyed and disgusted, and condemn their actions. Yet there’s also a fixation and underlying reverence we all seem to harbor towards them.
Some of these women are real—Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes, Patrizia Reggiani, Aileen Wuornos, or the slightly lesser known hustlers at Scores, Rosie Keo and Samantha Foxx (born Samantha Barbash). All eventually get their time in the zeitgeist of public discourse (typically once when their actions become public knowledge, and then again when those actions become the subject of a television show or film produced by one of the streaming giants). For Rosie and Samantha—two strippers in New York who stole from rich men by drugging them and running up their credit cards at clubs in New York—theirs came first through a feature story written by Jessica Pressler for New York Magazine in 2015 and later a film starring Constance Wu and J. Lo.
Others are fictional—the Villanelles (Killing Eve) or Amy Dunnes (Gone Girl ) that appear in your books, movies, and television shows. The most recent of these fictional women is serial killer, psychopath, and recreational cannibal Dorothy Daniels in A Certain Hunger.
Dorothy, a food writer right at the height of restaurant criticism in the early aughts, is a female character with qualities much of society often condemns a woman for having: single-minded ambition, an unapologetically insatiable sexual appetite, and a proclivity for unrestrained violence. She’s judged in some capacity for all attributes. It’s ultimately the last one that lands her in federal prison because, as mentioned before, she murders her former lovers and then eats them.
I’m not trying to make the argument that Dorothy, Rosie, Samantha, or any of the women I named above are shades anti-heroines whose complex humanity should excuse or eclipse what they’ve done. I don’t want to make a case for any of their actions—real or not—but I do think our collective fixation with this sort of character is worth inspecting and considering. What is it about these women that collectively captivates us?
For some, it’s how unbelievable it seems. How could two people scam their way to earning thousands of dollars a night? How could someone murder their past lovers with intentional precision, then consume different parts of their bodies and not feel repulsed?
I think a big part of these questions is that it’s not just “how could someone…” but “how could a woman?” Summers captures this sentiment specifically as it relates to murderesses and female psychopaths in the final few chapters of her book, when Dorothy is in prison and reminiscing on the events that led her there. “Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women,” Dorothy explains to the reader. “You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.”
Exchange “violence” for “manipulation” or just general malicious intent, and you reach the same reasoning for our collective obsession (and hatred) of female con artists.
Our culture perpetually views women with rose-colored glasses. They’re meant to be maternal, caring, kind, and generally soft. So when a woman is not one (or any) of those things, they’re able to slip beneath the surface because few could fathom a woman behaving outside of those characteristics. When Presller first introduces Samantha in “Hustlers at Scores,” she describes her body as “Jessica Rabbit curvy” and her lips as “Angelina Jolie puffy” but that “buried within this ultrafeminine package was a mercenary streak worthy of Gordon Gekko.” Later, when Samantha, Rosie, and the two other women they worked with get arrested, Rosie recalls one officer asking her how someone “smart” and “pretty” like her could get “wrapped up in this.”
“We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in glossy patina of caring,” Dorothy says. “Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It's not that women psychopaths don't exist; it's that we fake it better than men.” And this isn’t just the case for psychopaths. Feminity is the mask and weapon for these criminals. It’s also exactly what often ends up getting weaponized against them, whether it’s in a court of law or court of public opinion.
“You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.”
Some would also argue the fixation is in the blatant display of unbridled “female rage.” This was always something we all seemed hell-bent on hating and ignoring in women, until works like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl made it suddenly cool for us as an audience to see and relate to unreliable female characters doing egregious things.
It’s also important to note that this narrative and fixation only seems to apply to white con artists, murderers, and psychopaths. In our public perception, a white woman can commit unspeakable acts that we all acknowledge as unspeakable, but also secretly admire her for. That same courtesy is very rarely, if ever, extended to minority women, especially Black women.
Whether these women are real or not, the narrative capitalizes on one indisputable thing Dorothy points out in A Certain Hunger. “Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing,” she says.
We can trace part of the draw for this kind of character to the film adaptation of Gillain Flynn’s Gone Girl and the character of Amy Dunne. Much like Dorothy, Amy is a “fresh, if unnerving, take on the anti-heroine” and a “female villain who wasn’t just a nemesis to be jeered but also a mastermind to be cheered,” as described in a Hollywood Reporter interview with Flynn.
In the article, Flynn reflects on the legacy her novel and its adaptation had on the construct of anti-heroines in media. At one point, Flynn remarks that she was most “thrilled” about with Gone Girl was how “it reminded people that, yes, there is a goddamn appetite for women who are not saints; who are bad, but deliciously so—but [also] you still can kind of believe in.”
Part of what Flynn says audiences can “believe in” with Amy is her idea of the “cool girl”—the “man’s wet dream” kind of girl who rolls with the punches, doesn’t ask questions, and can essentially chameleon whatever her male significant other wants her to be at his whim. And while Flynn concedes that no, most of us likely wouldn’t go to the same lengths Amy does to react against that idea, “there’s enough there that we actually do relate to a fair amount of what she was saying.” We can’t reduce Amy to a “soapy, bitchy sort of villainess” because we’ve all thought some of the same thoughts she has. We just don’t act on them the way she does.
It’s a similar case with Dorothy’s ruminations on women’s capacity for ambition, sexuality, and violence. It’s also the case with Samantha and Rosie’s own desires to enact some sort of justice on rich Wall Street types. And, no matter how much you hate them or scoff at their delusion, you can’t deny the faint awe you feel that someone like Rosie, Samantha, or even Anna Delvey had the balls to step on people’s toes and succeed.
The existence of that connection and our faint admiration of these women is what Tori Telfer explains is the reason we’re so obsessed with female con women—because, in the moments when our emotions are most raw and we feel most vulnerable, we want to be her. We who agonize over if we’re putting too many exclamation marks in the emails. We who don’t want to take up too much space or make waves. We who say “it’s no big deal,” when it is, in fact, a very big deal. We who are expected to smile and generally exude pleasantness. We admire her, not for crimes, but because she feels some measure of freedom to commit them in the first place.
“What if we behaved like she does?” wonders Telfer. “What if we could charm like that? What if we shucked off morality, and society, and collective responsibility, and just let ourselves . . . indulge?”
For more books about women’s wrongs…
The Girls by Emma Cline: A faintly fictionalized retelling of the Manson Girls. It’s got intrigue, it’s got late 60s California (right before it all went to s***), and it’s got female murderers.
Gone Girl, obviously.
Wanna read a bit more about media portrayals of female psychopaths?
Check out this second-hand reporting done by Bustle exploring a psychiatrists comments on TV’s favorite female psychopath, Villanelle.