The female trainwreck is a familiar figure to us all: she's Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is as old (and as powerful) as feminism itself, and Doyle's book is a fierce, intelligent, deeply-researched investigation of a centuries-old phenomenon. Who is the trainwreck? What are her crimes? And, in an age when social media makes public figures of us all, what does it mean for the rest of us?