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An electrifying debut novel from an "unusually gifted writer" (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition
An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family's unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors' pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.
Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.
Rose Mueller vs. Tanya Maw
In girls' hand-clapping games there are no winners. You may be chided for missing a beat, or for forgetting one of the lyrics, but there is no victory that lies ahead for just one of the participants. Hand-clapping games exist only in a state of play, or a state of rest. However, they are not free of competitiveness. There is a pressure exerted by young girls upon one another to continue to clap, to chant the tongue-tied lewd nursery rhymes for as long as possible. This competitiveness lies in the clapping pair's desire for maximum endurance. The lyrics of girls' hand-clapping games are endless. Their choruses always circle back on themselves so that the game is played on loop, begun again by the same lyric that signals the game's end.
* * *
As the referees begin this fourth bout, the last bout of the day, in this darkened warehouse where only nine onlookers remain, there is the implication of a loop, or the suggestion of a repetition, a circular groove within which the tournament has fit its narrative.
* * *
These last-bout fighters look caricatured in their desire to beat one another. They each wear frowns that make them look like actors.
* * *
The industrial bulbs of Bob's Boxing Palace cast omnipresent white like the lighting seen in theaters. In stage acting, makeup must be twice as caked to even show up to the eyes of the audience. Because of this, in this washed-out ring of light, Rose Mueller and Tanya Maw both look like they have monochrome white faces. Rose Mueller's hair is cut so short that you can barely see it under her headgear. Tanya Maw has woven her long hair into two looped braids. Her ovals of hair stick out of her headgear and place droopy circles on her back. Tanya Maw has her shoulders pulled forward over the center of her spine. Tanya Maw pushes her hands towards Rose Mueller and Rose Mueller moves her own hands to greet them. They're not clapping, but their hands are smacking each other in rhythm. Tanya Maw can hear clapping rhymes as her fists touch the fists of Rose Mueller. I'm an actor, says Tanya Maw, in her head, to herself. Tanya Maw needs to play the part of the winner.
* * *
The most famous hand-clapping game Tanya Maw knows is the one about the tugboat, where the last line of every verse morphs from a normal word into a crude trick. Tanya Maw used to love this game, although now, at seventeen, she is decidedly too old to play it. There had been something wonderful about listening to even her best, most well-behaved classmates put words in their mouths that changed mid-breath from banal to naughty. The words had changed while still lodged in their throats. She could see the words themselves shape-shifting, the strangeness of the word ask changing into ass, a fly bug changing into a crotch-covering zipper. As a young girl, playing hand-clapping games for hours on end, Tanya Maw had seen small, one-inch sculptures of the morphing words on the tongues of her playmates. When her playmates got to the end of a verse, she could see the sculpture of the word remold itself from something boring into something forbidden, and then these forbidden word sculptures were spit out into a pile on the pavement between the two girls who were at play. The more verses the girls got through, the more forbidden word sculptures they made. In those early days of girlhood there were piles of these sculptures all over the playground. It was a graveyard of hand-clapping games that had been played earlier that day. Tanya Maw has never met Rose Mueller before, but the way that Rose is clenching on her mouth guard makes Tanya think Rose is about to spit out a forbidden word sculpture. There is something foul inside the mouth of Rose Mueller.
* * *
Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller are not hand clapping. They are boxing. But there is a collaboration in the way that they stand. When Tanya Maw extends her fist out Rose Mueller greets it. When Rose Mueller puts her left leg forward, Tanya Maw moves back. There...
From HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Rita Bullwinkel.
Anyone who's participated in, or even attended, a sports tournament knows about the intensity of that concentrated frame of competition; for a period of hours or days, time ceases to exist. All that matters is what's happening on the court, on the field, or—in the case of Rita Bullwinkel's debut novel, Headshot—in the ring. Set amid the glow of the fluorescent lights of Bob's Boxing Palace (a converted warehouse) in Reno, Nevada, Headshot recounts the drama that is the 12th Annual Daughters of America Cup, pitting eight of the country's best 18 and under girl boxers against one another over two days in July.
Some of the boxers—like the seemingly prophetically named Artemis Victor (the youngest of the three champion Victor sisters)—are favored to win, while others are longshots at best. Some have family members among the paltry crowd of onlookers while others drove to Reno alone from as far away as Florida, Texas, and New Mexico.
The novel is structured like a tournament—in a series of bouts between rival boxers, beginning with the semifinals and culminating with the ultimate match. Bullwinkel is an accomplished writer of short fiction, and each of these bouts reads much like a short story, one in which characters' past and future selves revolve around the turning point of the present moment, where the only thing that exists is the body and its physical, violent relationship to another body. The narration, which unfolds without a single line of dialogue, also vividly demonstrates the relationship between mind and body, as each character's lived experience swirls around these bloody battles in the ring.
Andi Taylor, who meets Artemis Victor in the opening match, is haunted by a tragedy from her recent past. Kate Heffer finds mental stillness and focus by reciting the digits of pi. Her first-round opponent, Rachel Doricko, throws her combatants off-kilter by adopting an unsettling persona (including donning a Daniel Boone-style hat when she's not in the ring). Rose Mueller boxes to overcome a traumatic bullying experience, while Tanya Maw boxes to forget—at least for a few minutes at a time—the mother who abandoned her. Bullwinkel also grants readers glimpses of each girl's future, years or decades after she's quit boxing, in which these brief moments in the ring are a minor footnote or the pinnacle of achievement.
The girls' stories, as well as the past and the future, collapse into one another, expanding and contracting continually over the course of the novel. And that's kind of the crux of it all; as the narrative notes at one point, "If you stand in the middle of the ring you can send your mind up through the hole of the worlds built by the other girl boxers. You can travel through the layers of different imagined futures, and the different ways each girl has of being." This technique, this constant shifting of viewpoints and timeframes, has the effect of making the narrative feel simultaneously immediate and timeless, both intimate and expansive. These characters are at once intensely specific and universal.
Bullwinkel plays with preconceptions about gender and femininity, stressing each boxer's physicality, strength, and size while also showing how they actively resist categorization: "What a sad thing, to be a good girl ... mountains and mountains worse than good boy. There can't be a single girl in here who wants to be just fine." She shows the fragility of the line between good-natured but ribald playground hand-clapping rhymes and the aggression and release these girls pursue in the ring. In doing so, she vividly and viscerally interrogates preexisting notions of girlhood, of appropriate kinds of play, and of every girl's possible future.
Reviewed by Norah Piehl
C Pam Zhang, author of Land of Milk and Honey and How Much of These Hills Is Gold
Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel and Motherless Brooklyn
Rita Bullwinkel's novel Headshot depicts the intensity and intimacy of a girl's boxing tournament. Although women's boxing was only officially introduced to the Olympics in 2012 and was banned by the USA Boxing organization before 1993, accounts of women boxing date back to the 1700s. Here are just a few of the trailblazing women boxers throughout the history of the sport.
Nell Saunders and Rose Harland
These two competed in the first known women's bout in the United States, taking place in New York City in 1876. The prize? A silver butter dish.
Cathy ("Cat") Davis
Davis, born in 1952, was the first woman to be featured on the cover of the boxing magazine Ring, in 1978. She also, along with fellow boxers Marian Trimiar and Jackie Tonawanda, successfully challenged the state of New York for the right to box there. Unfortunately, her legacy was tarnished when her manager/boyfriend, Sal Algieri, was accused of "fixing" the results of boxing matches.
Marian ("Lady Tyger") Trimiar
Trimiar, born in 1953, has been a staunch advocate for women's boxing. In addition to fighting for the right to box in New York State, in 1987 Trimiar conducted a month-long hunger strike to protest unequal conditions for female boxers. She said, "Unless women get more recognition, we will be fighting just as a novelty for the rest of our lives. There will be no future."
Christy Martin and Lucia Rijker
These two athletes are the first women to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in a 2020 ceremony. Martin, known as the Coal Miner's Daughter, boxed professionally from 1989 until 2012, frequently appearing on the undercard of globally famous male boxers like Evander Holyfield. Rijker, known as the Dutch Destroyer, boxed from 1996 to 2004 and was unbeaten both in her boxing and previous kickboxing career.
Katie Taylor
Taylor is an Irish boxer who won the gold medal in the lightweight division at the 2012 Olympic Games after lobbying for the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to officially include the women's sport and carrying the Irish flag during the opening ceremonies. Since then she has continued to amass victories, becoming only the eighth boxer in history—male or female—to hold all four major boxing world titles—WBA (World Boxing Association), WBC (World Boxing Council), IBF (International Boxing Federation), and WBO (World Boxing Organization)—simultaneously. Taylor, along with Amanda Serrano (whom she defeated), participated in the first women's boxing match to headline Madison Square Garden, in a bout that was named Fight of the Year by Sports Illustrated.
Illustration of women boxing from The National Police Gazette, 1894, via Wikimedia Commons
Filed under People, Eras & Events
By Norah Piehl
A stunning debut novel following the turbulent relationship of a Black, biracial teen and her ferocious Russian mother, struggling to survive in the California desert.
From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise new novel about three generations of women.
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