Savage Appetites Quotes

“Sometimes women’s attraction to true crime is dismissed as trashy and voyeuristic (because women are vapid!). Sometimes it is unquestioningly celebrated as feminist (because if women like something, then it must be feminist!). And some argue that women read about serial killers to avoid becoming victims. This is the most flattering theory—and also, it seemed to me, the most incomplete. By presuming that women’s dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts are drained of their menace. True crime wasn’t something we women at CrimeCon were consuming begrudgingly, for our own good. We found pleasure in these bleak accounts of kidnappings and assaults and torture chambers, and you could tell by how often we fell back on the language of appetite, of bingeing, of obsession. A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“A distorted sense of danger isn’t just psychologically taxing; it also encourages us to perceive risk where there isn’t any. Steeping in ominous stories can make people into threats themselves. The news is full of examples of how ambient anxiety gets turned against people of color going about their daily lives—taking a nap in the student lounge; walking down the street; selling lemonade. I thought of the woman who called the cops on two Native American brothers who were on a college tour at Colorado State. The teenagers made the woman “nervous,” she told the 911 operator. “If it’s nothing, I’m sorry. But it actually made me like feel sick and I’ve never felt like that.” Many people are feeling sick these days, for many reasons. But we should all be careful about the stories we tell ourselves to explain why.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“It mattered less what she saw than that she kept looking.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“Nothing makes people more righteous than feeling they are in possession of a truth that others don’t want to hear.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“I didn’t hear a single story about the people who are disproportionately at risk of homicide: sex workers, the homeless, young men of color, trans women. Instead, there were more teaser-trailers for TV specials about murdered moms, or moms who murdered.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“Detective stories make good reading material for misfits. They teach you that being overlooked can be an advantage, that when your perspective is slightly askew from the mainstream, you notice things that other people don’t.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“But even as I settled back into the slow daily labor of writing, I thought often of the work that was happening back there, invisible to many, and of how in the courthouse every Monday a dozen men and women stood up and repeated their lines, players in a performance we’d somehow agreed to call justice.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“The great dramatic story of her life had reached its crescendo -- and then life went on, and now what were they supposed to do all day?”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“The West Memphis Three may have been innocent, but that didn't mean that Byers was guilty. "We really hard-core believed that the profile was real," Lisa Fancher told me. "'Look, they're human bite marks!' And...nope. When you get real people who cost a whole lot of money, they're like, 'no, those are turtle marks.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“A neat, punitive logic was at work here: if the state wasn't doing much to make Americans feel secure, it could, at least, lock people up.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

“This fits with the broad cultural script that insists that women are interested in stories of violence because of their own history of violation—except that the women in the survey clarified that they weren’t just talking about harm that had been done to them personally, but societal trauma, too. A lot of them mentioned 9/11. Pain doesn’t have to be personal to be a motivating force.”
― Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession