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She´s everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck.

She´s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying, "crack is whack," and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself.

From Mary Wollstonecraft-who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman-to Charlotte Bront‰, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle´s Trainwreck dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to "behave."

Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Sady Doyle´s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate-an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.

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Sady Doyle founded the blog Tiger Beatdown in 2008. Her work has appeared in In These Times, The Guardian, Elle.com, The Atlantic, Slate, Buzzfeed, Rookie, and lots of other places around the Internet. She won the first-ever Women´s Media Center Social Media award by popular vote in 2011 and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Trainwreck is her first book.

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