Excerpt from Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

You bring your list of profiles to your boss, who looks them over. You meet with MTV executives. And everyone tells you the same thing: Can't you find girls who are more ... interesting?

At first you don't know what they mean. But these girls are interesting, you say. They are not letting their pregnancies ruin their lives! They are facing tremendous obstacles head- on! They are trying to disprove that whole "biology is destiny" thing! They are capable and mature and it will be thrilling to watch them as they work hard, harder than anyone else their age, to achieve their dreams!

We want girls with more "conflict," is how the executives put it, but what you soon realize is that they want girls who are the most naive and the least self- aware. Girls whose personalities are so bombastic and unpredictable that they are likely dealing with undiagnosed mental illnesses. Girls whose lives are disasters. So you go back to your inbox and look for the most brazen portraits and the worst grammar. And you type up a new report.

Your new report is a list of caricatures, each profile accompanied by a sassy- pleading portrait. It is a list of stereotypes about young women in America. Here is the New Jersey slut. Here's the once- wholesome Iowa gal with a heart full of gold and a belly full of sin. Here's the trailer trash, the ghetto queen, the princess. Here is the beauty queen and here is the party girl. Here is the aspiring model and here is the aspiring porn star. Here is the Madonna and here is the whore.

This list of girls is not what you consider True Life. It is not an accurate or complete list. You tell yourself it doesn't matter anyway: Your research is preliminary, the production shoot is months away, and none of the girls you interviewed will actually appear on MTV. And yet, you feel that your final list of girl caricatures does matter, for it is a testament to a certain cultural desire to make American women, yourself included, seem simple, stupid, slutty. You know this desire well, for you spent your own teenage years swatting it away with a violin.

You are not yet sure how you could, in the face of pressure from a massive corporate television empire, write a different list of girls, not sure how you could shape the world in a way that might mean such a list is never again written. You turn in your list of girl caricatures and the executives praise you for it. You get a hearty paycheck. And a few days after you turn in the list you leave MTV to go on tour with The Composer, in search of your own dreams, your own America.

Excerpted from Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman. Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.