CJ Leede refused to give her monster a tragic backstory, and I can’t stop thinking about what that says about every “justified” woman we’ve ever rooted for.
In almost every story about a violent woman, there’s a built-in permission slip. A man hurt her first. She’s avenging someone. There’s a wound, a reason, a tidy little arc that lets us cheer for her without feeling weird about it. We love a revenge girlie. I love a revenge girlie.
CJ Leede looked at that whole setup and decided she wasn’t interested.
If you haven’t found her work yet, consider this your invitation. She’s the author of Maeve Fly, American Rapture, and her brand-new release Headlights, which is out today. Her characters do not apologize for existing: a psychotic theme-park princess, a teenager surviving a sex-and-violence apocalypse, and now a grieving man driving through the dark. But it was Maeve Fly, her debut, that hooked into my brain and refused to let go. A woman doing genuinely monstrous things, for no redeemable reason at all.
When she joined me on Talking Horror, I had to ask her about it. Her answer gave me chills.
From the Talking Horror Podcast:
Me: Did you ever question whether you wanted Maeve to be a woman? Or did you always know you were just going to rest in the fact that she’s pissed off, and this is who she is?
CJ: I always knew she was going to be a woman doing these things. I wanted to feel what it felt like to be a Patrick Bateman in literature, but have them be more like me. And not because of the violence, but because of the total lack of fear. Being a woman in the world, it’s just a reality, and a hard reality, that there are differences in safety in this world for men and women.
I felt so out of power in my life. And I was seeing these men in literature. Obviously they’re problematic and messed up and awful and not anybody you want to emulate. But what they were was completely unafraid. Maeve was so cathartic for me because she was a character who got to move through the world like a man. She got to move through the world unafraid, feeling that she would not be physically overpowered by anybody.
I’m five-two. I’ve never felt that certain that I would not be physically overpowered by somebody. So I think that was a big part of it for me.
Me: And the criticism. Do you think she’d get the same criticism if she were a man?
CJ: I get way more criticism because the murders were not justified or revenge murders. We have plenty of women committing acts of violence in books, but people are cool with them because it’s revenge, and usually revenge on men. There are plenty of stories like that, and they’re awesome, and I love them.
But with this book, I wanted her to not have the trauma of being a woman be the driving force behind any of her actions. I wanted her to be just as monstrous as the men, and not have to justify it. The fact that we feel like female characters have to have their violence justified, and it usually is because of violence a man already did to her… I just wanted a seat at that existing table.
That’s barely scratching the surface of our conversation. We also get into the grief that fuels her writing, the “mystical, alchemical” flow state she writes from, purity culture and American Rapture, and why Headlights, her most tender and vulnerable book yet, finally let her sit with the question underneath all of it. What is death, and can we still reach the people we’ve lost?
My full sit-down with CJ Leede on Talking Horror. Rage, freedom, grief, and the female monster who owes you nothing. It’s a good one.
Headlights is out today, everywhere. Go grab it here, then come talk about it with me.
Also if you haven’t read CJ’s other American Rapture and Maeve Fly you should!
-Rachel Redd