Boxing as a sport holds this special place in the American psyche,” Rita Bullwinkel is saying. She describes how watching a bout, the way it’s lit, feels theatrical, similar to watching a monologue in a play. Her virtuosic and soulful novel, Headshot, offers readers a similar sort of focus, through the lens of a muscular, omniscient voice. The book revolves around eight young women, the best female boxers in the country under the age of 18, all of whom have traveled to Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno to compete in the Daughters of America Cup tournament.
Each of these boxers—Artemis Victor, Andi Taylor, Kate Heffer, Rachel Doricko, Iggy Lang, Izzy Lang, Rose Mueller, and Tanya Maw—is alive and complex on the page, even as they all fight like “assassins” intent on killing one another. But that’s the whole idea. Headshot is not only about who these young women are as they fight; it’s also a beautiful disquisition on time and its reversals. The narrative reveals the characters’ past and future selves while gracing us with the sense of time itself as an arena in which we can spring backward and forward.
Bullwinkel comes from a large Italian-Irish Catholic San Francisco family, although she grew up farther down the Peninsula. Her family found “joy and agency in the world” by watching and playing sports and took pride in her skills.
“As a young person,” Bullwinkel recalls, “I built a reality where these sporting competitions were all that my psyche circled around.” Reno exists psychologically for her as a satellite Bay Area city, because many who go there for youth sports tournaments and recreation, as she did, are from San Francisco and its environs.
Boxing, however, wasn’t one of Bullwinkel’s sports. She ran track and played basketball and water polo. In college, she was on a top 20–ranked Division I water polo team when she realized that, in spite of Title IX, the stakes for teams were different based on gender. Like Bullwinkel and other female athletes, the boxers in Headshot are highly self-motivated. “You have to be self-motivated,” she says, “when there are not sufficient funds for you, right?”
Bullwinkel wrote the book out of her own memories of “what it felt like as a young person, as a young woman, to travel far distances and compete.” This was a space, she adds, “that felt miraculous to me. Time was suspended, and the rest of the world kind of fell away almost in the way that reading science fiction can do to you.”
The bouts in Headshot developed organically; Bullwinkel did not know beforehand the victor of any given match or even the larger tournament. And astonishingly, the outcomes of these bouts never changed during revision.
The winner “was always the one.”
What made Bullwinkel feel like she could write about boxing, despite having fought only once or twice herself, was the discovery of a trove of YouTube boxing videos made by young women who’d filmed themselves training for the purposes of form correction. She’d spent hours when young rewatching her own training films, so this was a familiar vernacular. Simply in terms of mechanics, she notes, it would have been difficult to write in such a way about group sports; in boxing, “you have two portraits…two people.” The book’s title refers to the potent blows that boxers direct at opponents’ heads, but also alludes to photographic portraiture.
As the novel progresses, the collaborative feel of the fights intensifies. Alarming beauty emerges from the bruises: a “black eye looks like a ring of slim waxy petals from a purple wildflower.” The teens leave traces of themselves in their opponents, and the tournament feels like an “accumulation” of these traces, rather than a paring away of competitors to uncover the champion. Bullwinkel says, “I do think of all the young women more as comrades than as people invested in the downfall of each other.”
Take the first pair of fighters: Andi, grappling with profound loss, and Artemis, hot and perfectionist, from a family for whom boxing is all. Unexpectedly, Artemis likes to befriend people after she’s beaten them, and other characters also come to feel profound connections to, even a kind of love for, their opponents. “If you encounter someone you have competed against, there is this, like, gooey, strange physicality to the way you remember each other,” Bullwinkel explains.
This is not to suggest that Headshot is a work of realism, exactly. But if her debut effort, the collection Belly Up, featured rule-play in the form of absurdist stories, here Bullwinkel is more interested in world-building, which is essential to re-creating the insular landscape of the tournament. “I’m telling you how physics works differently here,” she elaborates.
The character Rachel, for example, follows a weird-hat philosophy. She believes her raccoon-skin cap offers power over conformists, which is effective since her opponent in the ring is a regimented people pleaser who cannot handle being startled. “To be a truly brilliant athlete,” Bullwinkel observes, “you have to reach a level where there’s some level of improvisation or you’re able to witness what you’re seeing and respond to it intuitively.”
What this means, she goes on, is that “for each sport, there is this canon of strategy and form.” If you’re a knowledgeable fan or follower, it’s “thrilling when someone deviates, and then there’s this hidden power.” The electric quality of Headshot is the result of similar “intuitions between the notes,” as Bullwinkel calls them at one point, analogizing top athletes and virtuoso musicians.
While sports once meant everything to Bullwinkel, her sixth sense about the space between elements of fiction yields a different glory. “Language,” she says, “has this hold over my mind, and nothing affects me, more changes me, more changes my body, than that.”•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
