For many people, particularly women in their 20s and 30s, 2023 was the year of the girl. Those 12 months gave us Barbie, girl math, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, girl dinners, and the coquette aesthetic—joyous rebuttals to the experiences of growing up too fast, too sexualized, without the innocence and joy of girlhood. But beneath the pink bows and performed delicateness lies an understated element of girlhood: how gritty and brutal coming-of-age can be, full of physicality, power, and a striking competitiveness. Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel, Headshot, out March 12, understands this perfectly.
Headshot takes place over a single weekend at a warehouse in Reno, where eight teenage girls from across the country meet for a national boxing championship. Told through the course of seven matches, Bullwinkel’s novel digs deep into the psyches of the competitors, its prose matching their hard-hitting swings. As they take blows and launch attacks, memories creep at the edges of their minds: a feral encounter, a tragic drowning, religious trauma. Without sexualizing her characters or burdening them with romantic whims, Bullwinkel has written a book that captures the brunt of teenage girlhood.
There’s Rachel, who wears a raccoon-skin hat like armor, and Artemis, the third sister in a line of boxing competitors. Andi is haunted by a recent death; Kate marks her steps by remembering digits of pi. Tanya imagines her match with Rose as a hand-clapping game. Cousins Iggy and Izzy must face off against each other before one of them can move on. But one question unites and bothers the young women: This contest, the most important thing in many of their lives up to this point, to which they’ve dedicated countless hours and traveled long distances—what is it all for?
Alta Journal caught up with Bullwinkel outside McSweeney’s San Francisco offices, where she serves as editor in chief of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Did you play competitive sports as a young woman?
Yes, sports were a really big part of my life growing up. I played competitive sports from an extremely young age and was the cocaptain of a top 20–ranked high school water polo team, and I was recruited to play in college. But before that, I was a part of sports leagues and competitions that were on a national and international level. When I was, like, 13, I was playing both basketball and water polo, and I have these memories of going to tournaments in really far-out parts of the country and [being in] the really confined and bizarre space of these sports facilities. There was so much anticipation and drama, and this weird feeling of oftentimes seeing the same competitors, like you always kind of knew who you were going to be playing against if you were on the circuit long enough. When I think about the longevity of my sports career, it’s interesting to me that this summer is the Paris Olympics, which I think is going to be the last Olympics where I competed for a long time against or was on teams with a bunch of [the players on] the women’s Olympic water polo team. I’m 35, so the women who are still on the national team are like its elder statesmen.
Do you feel like you’re still connected to that world?
I think so. I feel kind of emotional about it. Part of the reason why I wanted to write this book was because I had all of these memories about being a young, competitive youth athlete, and I had no idea who that person was. Like, why had I done these things? I wanted to write into that kind of confusion. I think of that past self with a sense of awe and shock.
So why focus your novel on boxing instead of water polo?
There’s so much about boxing that is like theater, in regard to the lighting and the boxing ring being like and feeling like a stage. As for the physics or the choreography of a boxing match, it’s a sport in which it’s always two people faced against each other in a way that they are in specific dialogue, in a way that group sports aren’t. Holding all of the consciousnesses of an entire soccer team, for instance, was not something that I felt capable of or that I was interested in. I was interested in seeing if I could create an environment of physical dialogue, and boxing does that so perfectly. As is alluded to with the book’s title, Headshot, I was thinking a lot about the book as an exercise in portraiture.
How did you choose Reno as your setting?
Reno has these really large sports complexes and hosts these national or regional youth athletic tournaments. It’s kind of an archetypal American city in that way: there are these medium- or small-size cities across the country that have invested in these large sports complexes to make money and host youth athletics. I competed in tournaments in a lot of them. And it creates this weird sense of the cities having these almost satellite or spaceship structures where you’re in a new city every time but the structure is always the same. It’s a really bizarre feeling.
I think one of the myths of girls’ sports is that they’re doing it for their parents. But for your characters, their motivation comes from other places, primarily themselves. Did you make that decision consciously?
Yes, absolutely. I don’t think of myself as a sports writer. I’m a writer who wrote a book about what it feels like to play a sport. But one of the things that happen so frequently in sports narratives, both in literature and films and societally at large, is this diamond-in-the-rough narrative. We can name some specific narratives that have this. Perhaps the one I’m most interested in ragging is Bend It Like Beckham. But you know, this notion that there’s this young woman who has potential but doesn’t know how to use it, and someone—it’s almost always a male coach or a father—is like, “You could be great.” In the narrative, they’re shadow-puppeting the young female athlete. Another perfect example is the Venus and Serena Williams narrative that we all live with, that their success is really due to their dad, which is ridiculous. I mean, I don’t know these women. I don’t know their family dynamic. But Hollywood was so obsessed with the idea of their dad being the real hero of their narrative that it made a whole film about it. I mean, it’s kind of comical that, as a society, we can’t even come up with a narrative in which the brilliance of a female athlete might actually be due to their own talent. It really does persist just with female athletes. I think about something like the world’s best violinists. Nobody says, “Well, they had a parent who saw that they could be one of the world’s best violinists” or “Their violin teacher knew that they could have potential.” With music, the agency is always given to the musician. It’s really just about an embodied young female. The notion that she could have physical autonomy is basically just unimaginable to the culture at large.
It was a thrill to encounter eight characters who all, in their own way, get equal play on the page. How did you differentiate them in your mind?
They definitely were each unique people. Although I do think at the end of the book, they bleed into each other a little bit. The way I understood the third-person narrator of the book was as a collective of young women boxers, like all the young women boxers that had come before this tournament. And all of the young women boxers that would come after. And even though each of the eight characters is individual, like I think of each of them as having individual childhoods and individual acts of great love and pain in their lives, there is also a collective energy about them. My hope is that, especially at the end, they bleed into each other a little bit.
There’s a question when you come out of adolescent competitive sports, as the young women in your book do, which is, did any of that really matter?
For the young women in the book, it does matter, and their bodies carry the memory of the sport with them. Their bodies and minds carry the feeling of what it means to try harder at something than they’ve ever tried before, maybe ever will try again. And that has meaning. But I do think that in order for each of these characters to compete at the level they’re competing at, they have to build meaning out of their wins that doesn’t actually exist. They have to make the events more meaningful than society thinks they are. And in that way, they live in a fiction.
Did you know who was going to win each match when you began writing?
No idea. I found out at the same time the reader found out. I feel like it was the only way I knew how to write the book. Once I had the structure, and I had the ideas of these eight main young women, I wanted to see how they would be in dialogue with one another. I discovered that on the page as I wrote it, and it was the dialogue between the two characters that revealed who would win.
Thanks so much.•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
