Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

As I write, there are new TV serials about the horrific torture-murder-dismemberment of women. One flirts around the periphery of the torture-death of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947 that was given the unduly elegant name “Black Dahlia murder”; the other is about the 1970s serial torturer, rapist, and murderer Ted Bundy, played by a handsome young star. It’s far from the first movie about Bundy, and the L.A. murder of Short has begotten a small publishing industry unto itself. When Givenchy came out with a Dahlia Noir perfume, advertised with the slogan “the fatal flower,” I wondered if it meant that women should aspire to smell like a mutilated corpse.