For the Teenage Girls in “Headshot,” the Boxing Ring Is a Place of Transformation

Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel Headshot takes place in the confines of a boxing ring in Reno, Nevada, over two days of championship matches to determine the winner of the 12^th Annual Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup.

Her protagonists, eight teenage girls, fight each other in a series of face-offs for the title “Best in the World”—a distinction that promises each of them varied but uniformly glorious escapes, ends, or transformations, and means nothing much to anyone else. 

The book animates the fantasies and realities of both competitive sport and adolescence in swift, muscular prose. Over the course of each fight, a window opens into the desire and delusion that motivates these girls to fight, and through it we glimpse as well the radical uses of the female body, whether it’s being looked at, measured, trained, or landing a series of punches.

I spoke with Bullwinkel at her home in San Francisco about the worldbuilding common to writing a novel and competitive sport, the strange intimacies of physical games, and the boxing narratives she’s bored by.

Olivia Parkes: A boxing tournament for teen girls felt like such a tight format for drawing out the psychology of girlhood: it’s a pressure cooker for perfectionism and obsession, a study in how the body is seen and used, as well as what it’s capable of. On the other hand it’s a jarring place to see those themes play out: boxing is a simulation of killing, a sport where you learn how to hit someone in the face and receive that same hit in return. In the early pages one of the fighters seems both obsessed with physical beauty and longs for a black eye. How did you land on this context for the novel?

Rita Bullwinkel: I grew up playing a lot of competitive youth sports. I ended up competing in the Junior Olympics eight times and was the co-captain of a top 20 ranked division one water polo team. From a really young age, eight or nine, I would travel to these weekend tournaments filled with dozens and dozens of other young women. 

The space of the tournament is one that I’m intimately familiar with. At the same time, it’s a bizarre, almost like science-fiction-like space, where the constraints of the world are incredibly finite and also intensely claustrophobic. In remembering that space, I was interested in the world building that had to happen, in both my own life, and also the lives of the girls I was competing against, to make a world that felt so heightened and so high stakes, when in reality it had no weight or importance in the culture at large.

I was interested in setting the book in a boxing ring in particular because of the inherent theater of the sport. So much about a boxing match feels like a play, from the lighting to the dialogue between fighters, which is nonverbal. I was interested in the boxing match as an archetypal piece of theater and also an archetypal American piece of theater. For better or worse there are tons of particularly American boxing narratives that we all carry around, and it’s something that I, as a viewer and reader, bring a lot of narrative baggage to.

OP: I think we’re quite used to seeing boxing as a spectacle, a form of entertainment that has a thrilling effect on its audience. But the fighting in the book doesn’t work that way. The audience is for the most part listless and inattentive. It’s made up of the coaches and judges and the one or two family members who accompanied each fighter to Reno. The fights here are unimportant to anyone but the girls themselves. How were you thinking about that tension, between the absolute passion of the girls and the inattention of their tiny audience?

RB: So much about writing reminds me of being a young female competitive youth athlete. I’m struck by how, in order to make any work of art, you have to build up a world in which it has meaning before the thing can come into fruition. And that same kind of building up of meaning is how I remember the space of the tournament. In order to come to a match, in order to come to compete in something, you have to build the narrative in your mind that it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do. I’m interested in that dichotomy, of being forced to build a world for yourself that is so disparate from the world that society sees around you.

OP: The story is told with a kind of God’s eye narrative voice that animates the competitors’ pasts, as well as their futures, while they summon the emotion and imagination that is required to win. I was struck by the fact that in almost all of their futures, this particular event, which is so central to them now as a focus of meaning and desire, is either forgotten by or irrelevant to their future selves. They can’t remember who they fought, why they wanted it so badly, whether it mattered. 

RB: I think that part of the book is about the really bizarre and strange way that the playing of a game can effect a collective memory. The narrative refers to a lot of games beyond boxing. There are hand clapping games, which never have a winner. There are pool games, like throwing rings in a pool. I think that when you play a game with someone, it does a really weird thing in shaping a shared memory. If you encounter someone who you played a game with, a game that had some kind of import, there’s a shared physicality that exists somewhere, even if it doesn’t exist at the front of the mind.

OP: I was interested in the fact that the fight that’s so vital to the teenager is irrelevant to the woman they become. It seemed to me somehow very poignantly adolescent, to place so much meaning on a single idea or event, believing that it will have a totalizing transformative effect. That particular type of desire seemed like a key into the identity formation of teenagers.

RB: It is. It is very adolescent. And yet it still feels relatable to me as an adult. I feel like I’m no less prone to delusion now than I was when I was 15. Part of my interest in having all the protagonists be adolescent women is that I can’t think of a group of people where the gap between the way that group of people see themselves and how the world sees them is so vast. I’m conscious of the fact that when I was 15, 16,17, the gap between how I understood myself and how the world understood me was enormous. 

OP: What was that gap?

RB: So much about being a young woman is defined by how well you can embody who you are. I think you could argue that the image of a young female is perhaps the most charged visual image ever. I mean, it’s very, very loud. I think about it in terms of how difficult it is to photograph a young woman, because the image of women in general is so charged. I even see it in author headshots, or portrait photography. That it’s very difficult to arrive at a visual depiction of a woman that has power and character. And as a teenage girl you’re receiving all of these messages that the only way you’re going to successfully exist in this world is by understanding the way you look physically. It’s a bizarre thing to become acquainted with, and there’s something dissociative about figuring out how you’re going to do it. What strategies you’re going to use. And then in the case of young female athletes, you’re also using your body for this totally other thing.

OP: One of the main ways the girl fighters in the book train is by watching videos of themselves. They also have to buy completely into the psychology of winning. In order for that to happen someone has to lose, and in the case of boxing that means physically beating them—with your fists. What made you want to get so close to that desire?

RB: I think there’s something comforting in binary the situation sports provide. It’s lack of nuance, right? In a game there must be a winner. Nothing else in life functions that way. 

I think specifically for young people, to whom everything about the adult world is opaque and strange, it can be a deep relief to enter a contract with clear rules of engagement, where you’re agreeing to that lack of nuance. It feels easy and seductive. I think that most of the young woman in the tournament are more interested in the narrative of themselves as a champion than they are in their triumph over another. They have to create these narratives of conflict in order to do the insane thing they’re doing with their bodies. But the eight main characters in the book, who are competing against one another, are ultimately comrades. I think there is an intense level of respect that comes with agreeing to play a sport with someone. To engage in or play a sport with someone is to agree that you’re equals in some way, which is one of the reasons, of course, why co-ed sports are so contentious. Because people don’t want to agree that the match is right, that it’s equal. 

OP: There’s also almost no dialogue in the book. The girls are involved in these deeply intimate encounters, but they never actually speak to each other. At some point you say that language has no place in the gym, that what you’re dealing with here is “the language of animals.” How did that absence of speech challenge or enable you to draw out the relationship between the fighters? 

RB: I think it allowed for me to depict a different kind of intimacy, which is the unique physical intimacy of sport. I was thinking recently about how within our society there are so few social contracts you can enter where it’s acceptable to touch someone else. There’s the romantic encounter. There are services like getting your hair done, or getting a massage. And then there’s physical sport. That’s it. 

It was really important to me that the book did not read in a Freudian way or reflect the idea that these young women boxers are acting out some type of masculine sexual energy that they’re unable to perform in other parts of their lives. I think they’re doing something much more interesting than that. That they’re engaging in a form of agreed physical intimacy that’s actually much more complex than acting out some type of sexual desire.

OP: The book turns its attention softly, but repeatedly, to the economics of the world of teen female boxing. There’s not a lot of money in the sport, and what there is of it circulates almost entirely between these exhausted-seeming men: the coaches, the referees, the judges, and the gym owners. Why was it important to you to bring that into the book?

RB: I have these really vivid memories of the cost of sports league memberships, and the cost to compete in tournaments. I remember seeing those numbers and being 14, with no source of my own income, and having to ask my parents for the money to do it. It was, for me, very expensive, but in hindsight everything was very low budget, because they were tournaments for 14-year-old girls. And it was, in fact, the case that all the people collecting the money, all the places where it was changing hands, were pretty much all exhausted adult men. 

I think that my generation is one of the first to grow up with the full actuality of Title IV. Looking back on it, I think a lot of the reasons why youth women’s athletics, or soccer leagues for five and unders for women exist is because colleges suddenly had to provide sports scholarships at the equal monetary rate for women as they were for men. All of a sudden this need for youth camps and youth training facilities and youth tournaments for women came into existence. 

In my experience growing up, I also had almost exclusively male coaches because women in my mother’s generation never played sports, so they didn’t know how to coach.

In writing the book, I wanted to decenter the coaches. I thought of them as a kind of décor. One of the classic sports narratives that I really abhor and had no interest in creating was this “diamond in the rough narrative,” which I think is particularly prevalent in boxing. Where an experienced male coach says to a young woman or a young fighter, you don’t know the talent you have, but I’m going to unlock it for you.

OP: Million Dollar Baby.

RB: It’s present even in the way people tell the narrative of Serena and Venus, where their father is the person that could tell they had talent and was responsible for cultivating it. It’s always a father or a coach, and it’s just boring.

OP: It’s perfect, because the coaches in your book are not invisible—the book draws attention to their presence again and again, in a soft way. But they’re irrelevant. They’re not a specter of terrible masculinity and they’re also not figures the girls really look up to. 

You’ve mentioned a couple of different sports or female narratives that you’re consciously working against. It made me wonder how you were thinking about competition and perfectionism in femininity. We learn that Artemis, one of the first fighters, sizes up other women physically everywhere. And along with this kind of implicit knowledge of who’s “prettier” is this kind of obsessive perfectionism around training.

RB: It’s true that very early on the book makes it clear that Artemis is physically comparing herself and her physical attractiveness to the other girls she’s boxing against. She also compares herself to her sisters. But I think of that as the narrative that she needed to build for herself in order to do this delusional, insane thing. Overall I thought of all eight of the young women more as comrades than as adversaries. I was also thinking about the narrator as a kind of Greek chorus of young female athletes, a voice that encompasses all the young female athletes that have come before them, and all those that will come in the future. That was part of my interest in going into both past and future. The perfectionism in the book is in some sense just either what’s required to do this thing or a byproduct of it. I think that to train like that you have to be incredibly obsessive. 

OP: For almost all of the girls, boxing offers some form of control, whether it’s control over the body, because you train it, or control over another body, which becomes a kind of object. The book says at one point that you can’t train for a sport unless you believe you have control over your own destiny; the point of training is to change the outcome of the future. What interested you in that desire?

RB: I don’t think I was consciously writing about control. I think it’s certainly part of the appeal and seduction that this specific type of encounter with someone offers. It’s part of what drives people to do physical sport. I don’t know if I’ve ever had such close control in my life over anything as I had over my body in a very specific period of time. Which has gone now! But it’s a very subtle thing. I would imagine it’s what drives people to become dancers. This idea that you can so closely control a bodily movement. It’s a very specific type of intoxicant.

OP: It also sits well with this sense of them being teenagers. It makes a kind of sense to me that this particular form of control is intensely desirable at that point in time. At that age, they’re in control of very little. 

RB: Exactly. There’s the feeling that if they can get this one thing down, then they’ll be able to sort everything out. But that’s not true, of course. Winning or losing won’t help them either way. And unlike the boxing match, life is not a game. In life there are no winners and no losers, just people with different, infinite repositories of love and joy and pain.