Fast Famous Women
75 Essays of Flash Nonfiction

In 75 brilliant new pieces of flash nonfiction, Fast Famous Women offers sharp, insightful, and delightfully necessary examinations of the often absurd, sometimes thrilling, and frequently crushing experience of being a woman in the public eye. It’s not enough for a woman simply to be wildly talented or sublimely accomplished, after all. She must be fast in her rise, conspicuous in her ascent, and utterly undeniable in her achievements. (She should probably also be cute, right? It can’t hurt if she’s cute.) 

Written with wonder, insight, and respect, famous women from Taylor Swift, Mary Shelley, Annie Oakley, Shirley Chisholm, and Lizzie Borden are subjects which allow us to grasp the perilous excitement of wanting fame —or perhaps, wanting to step away from it. To be a woman in the spotlight is to walk a tightrope, to balance on the narrowest of beams, where every misstep or excess is magnified, and every achievement is fraught with the potential for ridicule or resentment. 

With new and original short, seductive, and sometimes shocking works by Caroline Leavitt, Jane Smiley, Mimi Pond, Molly Peacock, Dimple Dhabalia, Phillis Levin, and Leighann Lord.

From the Introduction:

Ladies were never supposed to have their names appear in newspapers except for mentions of their marriages and their dates of death; even having one’s birth mentioned wasn’t entirely ladylike—and then discourteous people could always investigate one’s age, which was also never mentioned. Nothing about women was meant to be mentioned. Women were like vases: silent decorative vessels always waiting to be filled, rather fragile, and placed where they might whimsically distract but never claim attention.

(Like vases, though, they could also be dangerous when broken, thrown, shattered, or used as a weapon, but such matters were rarely discussed—in public. It was often only after a woman decided that she did not care how she was judged, or when she realized she had nothing to lose, that she risked being a topic for scandal and weaponized her own femininity.)