On Promising Young Women (and the Nameless Men Who Get in Their Way)

“The woman is a footnote in the man’s history.”
–Rebecca Hazelton
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There’s this photo of Lana Clarkson that I think about often. She’s outside, backed by a blue sky, the green and brown spotted hills out of focus just behind her. Her white shirt has slipped over her bare shoulders; she’s looking back at the camera over her right one, her blonde curls soft around her face, cascading down her back. The sun is in her eyes, but she’s staring at the photographer steadily. I don’t know when the photo was taken or by whom, but it’s a memorable shot of a lovely young actress on the rise. It makes me wish I’d met her before she was murdered.

Lana Clarkson, photographer unknown.

Not many people know who Lana Clarkson is beyond the infamy of her death. She was murdered in 2003 by a very famous man who eventually died in prison. But Lana was her own person: an actor, a comedian, beloved by her family and friends, a kind, talented woman who volunteered weekly for the AIDS charity Project Angel Food during the 80s, a time when many people would barely say the word AIDS aloud. When she was murdered in 2003, she was just 40 years old.

I first saw Lana in Amazon Women on the Moon when I was a teen. The movie is a spoof of both 1950s sci-fi B movies and the experience of watching them on late-night TV. My stepfather had it on VHS, and I watched it on repeat, not for the absurd list of talented actors and actresses who made an appearance, but for Lana and Sybil Danning, who both played fierce bimbos, so sexy and awkward and funny and pitch perfect in their roles that I fell a little in love with them both.

I sought Lana out again in the Barbarian Queen movies, her cameos in Scarface and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, her brief appearances in episodes of Night Court and Three’s Company and Knight Rider and Wings. I read all of Dominick Dunne’s coverage of her killer’s trial at Vanity Fair for the tidbits of information about Lana. I wondered, too, what happened to her when she disappeared from films in the years preceding her death. I missed her presence on the screen, and so I watched her older movies on repeat.

After her death, I learned that, like many actresses in Hollywood, she found roles harder to come by in her thirties; she was building her comedic chops with a one-women show, and meanwhile, she took a variety of other jobs to make ends meet. It wasn’t until recently that I saw clips from that show in a docuseries on her death, and what I saw was rich with both wit and self-awareness. I realized why my interest in her and her death was so pointed, so personal, even though I didn’t know her. It was because Lana, a beloved actress with a cult following and a knack for comedy, had so much promise, and she was murdered before she could determine where it would take her.

Thoughts of Lana surfaced again when I watched 2020’s Promising Young Woman, although it took me a while to register the connection. Cassie, played by the brilliant Carey Mulligan, reminded me of someone the moment she stepped on screen. Her hair, her aesthetic, her caricature of the blonde bombshell all reminded me of Lana. Just like Lana, there was someone clever, driven, working beneath the veneer of the beautiful temptress. In the film, Cassie’s intelligence gets subsumed by her obsession with seeking revenge for her friend’s sexual assault and subsequent suicide, and that obsession makes her take foolish risks like the one that lead to her murder at the film’s end.

I hate that ending. I hate how we’re forced to watch minute after gratuitous minute of Cassie’s brutal murder on screen, forced to buy into the treacly denouement that insists that another dead girl got her revenge even though she lost her life, forced to swallow the ridiculous white woman’s fantasy that the police will mete out justice for Cassie even though they failed to mete out any for her friend. But I bought the story of a bright life cut short. I bought Cassie’s induction into what I call—thanks to that wretched movie—the archetype of the Promising Young Woman, the fierce rising star who is never allowed to evolve past her auspicious beginnings and whose life inevitably ends in ruin or death, typically at the hands of men.

While the Promising Young Woman has elements of other archetypes—a little of the Hero, the Femme Fatale, the Doomsayer, the Survivor—it is firmly its own symbolic universe. But because the Promising Young Woman can take many different forms—from the tragic to the comedic, from knowing to naive, from the reverence for grand narratives to the rejection of them, from cynical to sincere—it is often a mash-up of modern and postmodern characteristics. As a result, it leans toward metamodernism, which is one name for the shifts in cultural and artistic frameworks and thinking that have emerged in the wake of postmodernism.

Terminology, however, is insufficient: the Promising Young Woman is messier and more complicated than the rape revenge subgenre or tales of women done wrong, a pastiche of contradictions that further mucks up Northrop Frye’s distinct archetypal schema and heightens its own significance. Despite its integration of elements from more contemporary artistic and cultural movements, the Promising Young Woman archetype wasn’t invented by the 2020 film but simply brought back into relief: it is a deeply conflicted and frequently replicated character arc, a pattern both recognizable and urgent. The Promising Young Woman captures, but it does not contain, the shame, horror, and the potential of real women, like Lana Clarkson, like Breonna Taylor, Andrea Skinner, Augusta Britt. And like those women, the archetype bleeds easily, profusely, beyond the confines of fiction and into the edges and expanses of real life.

My temptation here is to continue to build my case like a scholar—to talk about Wharton’s Lily Bart or Pauline Hopkins’s Dianthe Lusk, to make an argument for the hundreds of violated women of Law and Order’s SVU or Natalie Hanson of Wind River, to expound on Ophelia. The work would be simpler that way. But the Promising Young Woman is about more than what Alice Bolin calls the genre of the dead girl. And this is not a scholarly article. I am not one measured step removed but right at the heart, which is why I have had to write my way careful as a blade into the meat of this. This story isn’t about women like Bolin’s, gauzy as ghosts and trapped in the confines of memory. This story is about women who once lived. I have to be sure the cut is true.

There is so much blood in this, so many women. But the only blood I can speak to is my own.

I’ve told this particular story just twice, once long ago to a therapist, once more to another a few years back. I promised myself I wouldn’t tell it again—I’ve spent years trying not to tell it even to the page—but some stories, especially the kind that reveal both archetypes and secrets, are insistent.

So I’ll tell it like this:

Once I was a child, and I was smart and confident. The adults in my life told me I had potential, a bright future, that I should set my sights high. I believed them. And then, one afternoon when I was 10, about six months after my first period and a few months after my breasts grew to C cups nearly overnight, a man I loved and trusted cornered me on a set of stairs and wouldn’t let me pass. He told me to lift up my shirt and bra so that he could see my breasts, which were new and uncomfortable and which I hated.

And because I loved and trusted him, because no one had ever warned me that a man I loved and trusted might be just the kind of man to ruin me, I believed he must have a reason for asking, and so I lifted my shirt and my bra, and he fondled my breasts. After an indeterminate amount of time, the man leaned closer to me.

“Someday your husband is going to love these,” he said.

It’s been 37 years since that moment, but it remains as clear in my memory as the replay of a film. The smell of whiskey on his breath. The plaid of his flannel shirt, green and brown and tan. The music in the background, softly. The white paint peeling on the wall above his shoulder, the pressure of his hands. The shame and fear and disgust that welled up inside me, the bullish resistance that struggled to quell it because this man would never hurt me, this man was never wrong. And then he took his hands away from my breasts and patted me on the shoulder, and it was so awkward, so incongruous with what he’d just done that it felt like confirmation of my denial, like what had happened was somehow good and right. I pulled down my bra and shirt, and he walked past me up the stairs. We both continued on.

I continued on this way for years.

I lived my preteen and teenage life in a kind of limbo, my emotions and reactions compartmentalized, split into disparate parts that couldn’t reconcile. I would think about my hopes and dreams and all of my supposed promise, and then some part of me would tuck those dreams away and think only of the man. He said he loved me. He touched me in a way that made me sick. The single sentence he spoke to me that day rang over and over in my head like a gong. And those disparate facts made no more sense as part of a whole than my own life did.

But I was a kid. And so for years, I believed I was the one who must be wrong.

I told no one. I kept quiet, kept on, kept him in my life, even though the abuse became routine, because I did not know how to remove him. For years, I tucked each incident away in my mind as if it was a singular event: when he held me down and tickled me, sometimes until I peed myself, while I begged him to stop. When he criticized or sexualized my body. When he forced me to see him naked and suggested I was a prude for exhibiting discomfort. When he embraced me without my consent and pressed his erect penis against me.

Each time, I held my breath and pretended it was just this once. Each time, I wondered if this would be the time he finally raped me. He never did. And because he also told me he loved me, and I could do and be anything, I told myself it was not a pattern, and it could always be worse.

It could be worse, but I began chewing my nails to the quick.

It could be worse, but I began eating less, becoming as skinny as I could because part of me thought he might leave me alone if I did, but he didn’t stop.

It could be worse, but I started eating more, gaining weight, thinking that might put him off instead, but it didn’t work. Nothing did.

I resisted acknowledging the pattern even as I put myself into positions for him to reenact it. A deep, dark part of me believed that I must have done something to invite this, and a deep, dark part of me also thought that if he kept doing it to me, he wouldn’t do it to anyone else. I insisted over and over again to myself that I was used to it, that it didn’t mean anything, that really, he loved me, because I was so desperate to feel loved instead of perpetually alone. I was able to keep up the farce until he eventually moved away.

When the farce ended, I didn’t face the reality of what he’d done. I couldn’t. It was easier to just attach myself to other teen boys and men, easier to pretend that single sentence he spoke to me transformed my body into some kind of currency. And, in a way, it did.

The kind of attention I received through sex and sexualization—because that was what most men and boys gave me—felt normal, easy. Finding men who want me for sex has always been easy. Learning to laugh off the gropes, the sexual jokes, the harassment, the assaults—that was harder. But finding men who treated me with respect, like a human being instead of an object, was difficult, destabilizing; finding men who made me feel safe was nearly impossible.

Over the course of my life, I’ve been lucky to find a few: one when I was 16, two in my mid-twenties, another in my early forties, mentors and bosses and colleagues and friends. These men listened and took me seriously. They spoke to me without a hint of mockery or condescension; they never made a gesture toward or comment about engaging in a sexual relationship with me. They upended completely what by then I believed men to be. I also found a handful friends of all genders who loved me without judgment. Each of those people slowly nudged some small compartmentalized part of me back toward unification. With each demonstration of care, they showed me that that man who said he loved me had lied, something I began to work through silently.

It wasn’t until late 2021 that I met one more man, a lover and friend whose creative and cultural work I deeply admire and who approaches the world with curiosity and compassion, a man who makes me feel safe, respected, and seen, a man I eventually fell in love with. By then, I’d been writing this essay in bits and pieces for six years, and I felt like a person again, not whole, exactly, but in the process of unifying.

Still. Just five men, of the thousands I’ve known in my life. I think of all of the men Lana Clarkson had encountered by the time she met her killer, how all it took to ruin her was one.

Lana’s murder at 40 fills me with an inexpressible grief because in many ways, my 40th year was when my own life began. At 40, I was deep into therapy, wrestling with the idea of divorce, when I finally acknowledged out loud in a therapy session what I’d known for a while: that the man who told me as a child that he loved me had sexually abused me. He had violated my boundaries and my consent; his aim was never connection, but control. I knew by then that love cannot and does not coexist with those things.

I realized too that I had spent my life seeking out men who had characteristics that were similar to my abuser, and that denying that fact and locking that abuse away had poisoned nearly every relationship I’d ever had. That night after therapy, I went through the nighttime routine with my children. Once they were asleep, I went to the bathroom and threw up my dinner, then lay for hours on my office couch. Still, I told no one. I did not know how to even begin to speak about this enormous, awful thing. But I knew I had to face it, not only for myself, but for my kids, because I never wanted them to experience what had happened to me.

A couple of years later, my divorce finalized, I found my thread of promise again: I got an agent, had an essay chosen as notable for The Best American Essays, and published a photo essay that changed the trajectory of my life forever. At 40, I was on the cusp of opportunities and events that I’m beginning to see play out in my life now at 47: a job I love, my first book, healthier relationships, autonomy.

At 40, Lana Clarkson was on the cusp too, but we’ll never know what of, because she is dead.

I think often about Dominick Dunne’s writing about the trial and his writing about Lana; I admire how he dedicated so much of his work to victims of abuse and murder in honor of his daughter Dominique, who was killed by her abusive boyfriend who then served little prison time. I know Dunne considered himself in Lana’s corner, and much of his work about her is thoughtful.

But there are moments where his writing about “poor dead Lana,” as he called her, is reductive, casting her more as a tragic figure than as the kind, talented, funny woman she was. There is one thing in particular that he wrote that enrages me: “I believe Lana’s name will go down in Nathanael West-type Hollywood lore as a great beauty for whom the Hollywood dream had not come true.” I wish Dunne had worded it differently. In fact, I wish he hadn’t written it at all, because regardless of intent, it cast her beauty as her greatest asset and her death as her defining characteristic, and it reads as yet another man dictating the course of Lana’s life without her consent.

Instead, I prefer to remember the particularities of what her friend Steve McPartlin said about her state of mind when he saw her two days before her murder over Dunne’s generalizations: Lana was happy, said McPartlin, and “had everything going for her” because she’d just finished her one-woman comedy show and had an infomercial contract on her lawyer’s desk, ready to sign, that would have paid her a lot of money.

I remember actress Sally Kirkland, who met Lana on the set of a play, noting that she was a pro: “She would come earlier than anybody, she worked harder than anybody.” I remember that Pamela Brannon, the project services manager for Project Angel Food, said that Lana had a “beautiful heart.” And I remember too Lana’s mother, Donna, who scoffs at the defense’s suggestion that her daughter would have shot herself in the mouth when she had just spent a lot of money at the dentist and how the “B-movie” moniker that so many journalists insisted on tacking to her daughter’s name would have been something that Lana transformed into a joke. “Lana would have taken that herself and put it in her comedy act,” Donna told the Los Angeles Times.

I think often too of what the Hollywood dream was for Lana, of how it was evolving: she fought tooth and nail to stay in a cutthroat industry for 20 years, and she did so in creative, resilient ways. I wonder what she was proud of at 40, of what more her life and work would have been, if she had been allowed to live.

Dreams, however, are fickle things.

I was 40 still, just barely, when I finally confronted my abuser, something I’d been dreaming of. Once I tracked him down, I took a short trip to visit him. He met me at the door with a smile. He was shorter than me now, white-haired, a ghost of the man I remembered. His house smelled of cigarette smoke and deli meat. He shuffled across his cracked tile floor with the assistance of a cane. I sat in his living room in an old plaid recliner, and I told him what he did to me, just as I had practiced in therapy. Every memory, every incident. He stopped smiling. After a few minutes, he began to cry. His hands shook as he took a handkerchief out of his pants pocket to blow his nose.

I’m sorry, he said. I don’t remember. I was drinking a lot back then. It was a long time ago.

I was a child, I said. I remember everything.

Would you like some coffee? He said.

I declined.

We were alone, the two of us. His wife had left him years before, he said. His children rarely visited. The last of his friends had died. He was having trouble remembering things. I watched him cry. I wanted to cry too, but I could not. How long I had waited for this moment. How long I had dreamed of it. I’d thought about how I would tell him these stories in front of a crowd, how I would embarrass him, how the crowd would boo him down. How good it would feel to hurt him, to watch him suffer. But in my imaginings, it was me, the child, breaking down the adult he used to be, not the one before me, wizened by age. He was smaller, sadder than I remembered. Fragile. Lonely. He looked like a distant relative of himself, someone I could break with the crack of one clenched hand. The man who abused me was gone; this was all that was left. All the dreams I’d had of violence, all of that rage and desire—gone too. I watched him twist his handkerchief in his hands, the bend and tremor of his arthritic fingers.

And yet, here we were: me and him, sitting across from one another in his living room—a respectable veneer over something vile. Something so awful that it had shaped my entire life. Something so banal that he didn’t even remember. We were pitiful, he and I.

Can you forgive me? he said finally. But I said nothing. I simply got up and walked out of his house and drove away. His apology was useless. Words couldn’t fix what he did, couldn’t give me back all those painful, wasted years. And apologies mean nothing when no work is done alongside them. I also knew there was no restitution or repair monumental enough to satisfy me. I could not forgive him because he hadn’t earned it. He hadn’t even tried.

But the tears. Those meant something. So did the loneliness. I told myself that either he was a liar and irredeemable, or he’d have to live with himself and without my forgiveness for the rest of his days. But I suspected this too was a dream: most likely, this day too would be something he would forget.

There is a turn this genre of confessional writing usually takes: confrontation, accountability, punishment, redemption. I’ve read so many essays and books where people acknowledge their abuse or confront their abuser and they feel empowered, or they find it in themselves to forgive, or they are surrounded by support and love and they feel uplifted. I admire them. I’m also jealous.

I’ve written so many versions of this essay in the last decade, and I managed the confrontation, but I can’t give you the rest. There was no accountability, no punishment. My abuser will soon be moving to a nursing home. He can barely walk; his memory is nearly gone. There is neither justice nor peace nor any kind of moral victory in forcing an old man with dementia into a trial for a 37-year-old crime. He will live out his final days in comfort. I would like to wish him a long and painful death, but I don’t even have that in me these days. I hope death comes quickly. It would be nice to live in a world without him for a while.

There is no redemption, either, for either of us. I told only a few people my abuser’s name. As far as I know, he was never outed, never faced any kind of justice. I take full responsibility for that. I compartmentalized these memories for so long, shoved them away so I could survive. There was no part of my life where I felt safe enough to begin to confront them until about ten years ago, at first only in my thoughts, and finally now a little at a time in writing.

I wonder now if he abused other young women. I’m terrified he did. And I will never forgive myself for it, although I’m trying to find a measure of peace. My story is something I’ve lived with largely alone for my entire life, and I can live with that decision, but I’m devastated that my silence might have led to another young woman’s suffering. The result of all of this is mostly a profound sense of unresolved sorrow and the realization that even though I didn’t cause this, somehow I still failed.

I keep bookmarking essays on grief. Christina Sharpe, Raven Lelani, Jesmyn Ward—they write so beautifully and with such elegant precision that I read them over and over again, hoping I will internalize their lessons. But my grief is a hostage. It’s tacked up inside me by these sharp little slivers of shame and rage that I’ve been carrying around for decades. On the rare occasions that I cry, I can feel the whole of my grief, trapped, struggling. Therapists have encouraged me to try to let go, to cry and scream, but I cannot. Most of the time I cry silently, so no one will hear, the way I learned to as a child.

I wonder if I will finally be able to cry when he is dead.

And yet, even now, I will not name him. One of the therapists I told this story to once asked me why. Naming, she said, is power. I told her then about reading Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal, about her reimagining of inoperativity, of inclination, of Saidiya Hartman’s fabulation, about Euripedes’s Bacchae and how Honig says its women reject work not because they are drunk or mad or indolent but because they are instead demonstrating their resistance to expectations of obedience.

Think about the potential their refusal provides to enact transformative change, I said.

My therapist looked down her glasses at me.

Classic academic defense, she said. That’s what your head is telling you. What does your body say? What about your heart?

I sat there for a moment, one hand on my stomach, another on my chest, trying to ground myself in my body, something I am learning now as an adult, something I learned as a child never to do because my body did not belong to me.

He has no family, no friends, I said. I can’t find anything about him online. If I name him, I give him eternal life, and he will follow me forever.

She was right, though. Naming is a kind of power. This is why I haven’t written the names of the man who killed Lana Clarkson, or the men who murdered Breonna Taylor in her bed, or the woman who betrayed Andrea Skinner and the man who abused her, or the man who groomed Augusta Britt. All of these women and so many like them never had the chance at a life without the names of the people who hurt and exploited them linked to theirs. I now understand what a privilege that is. The least I can do for them is to let them live on this page awhile, unencumbered.

What would it mean for women real and imagined to live without the weight of their abuse, without their unavoidable linkages to horrible men? What kind of difficult, mundane, incredible lives would they live? What would Breonna’s wedding have been like? What joys would she have shared with her family, her friends? What if Andrea’s mother had protected her? What if Augusta had been taken in as a daughter instead of as a lover? What would Lana have done with her 41st year, or her 47th? What kind of ending would Cassie and her friend have written for themselves, if they’d had the choice?

I wonder sometimes how my own life would be different. I think about the future I was headed toward before my abuser took it away from me. I try not to dwell on it, because just like the women I write about here, I’m a person, not an archetype. As best I can, I am rebuilding my life; I am achieving difficult, mundane, incredible things. I do take a small measure of joy in spoiling Frye’s schema yet again.

I also find a grim kind of pleasure in allowing myself one small act of vengeance. I have the name of my abuser on my lips right now as I write this. I hold his name in my fingertips. I could immortalize him if I wanted. I choose instead to let the world forget. Because the real power isn’t in the naming. It’s in being the one to tell the story.

Meg Pillow

Meg Pillow is a writer, editor, scholar, and Roxane Gay's project manager. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature, Guernica, The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of Do The Work and lives in Kentucky with her children.