Rita Bullwinkel’s Novel About Teen Girl Boxers Packs a Punch

In Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel makes an electrifying claim: “Each girl born has the ability to be activated into a boxer.” Her debut novel is an absorbing study of eight teen girl boxers competing in the 12th Annual Daughters of America Cup in Reno, Nevada. It is about female potential — a small community of girls who harvest it in themselves and learn to communicate in a secret language of fists.

Though she doesn’t have a boxing background herself, Bullwinkel — an English professor at University of San Francisco— has always wanted to write a book about teen girl boxers because of how “inherently theatrical” she finds the sport. “The ring looks like a stage; the lighting looks like a stage; and it is one human in conversation with one another,” she explains.

The narrative and emotional core of Headshot lie in the ring, and each bout is weighty and intense. The book opens on a tournament bracket that teases each pending match up, with chapters named after the fighters. Instead of getting dialogue, we live inside each fighter’s mind, and each mind is a universe.

Bullwinkel plays with time by moving comfortably backwards and forwards, allowing us to exist in the present while simultaneously bobbing and weaving through the girls’ life experiences — childhood trauma, insecurities, girlhood milestones, careers. This sprawling bird’s-eye view should be dissatisfying; it tells us ahead of time that their efforts on this day will not translate to a lifetime of professional boxing or any fancy accolades. But it’s a winning narrative strategy that makes the book hum with urgency.

Bullwinkel’s first book, Belly Up, was a surreal story collection that explored the material strangeness of having a body. In many ways this book is a sister to it. The girls we meet are all learning to live inside their bodies, to care for, wield and rely on them to communicate their needs and dreams.

“I wanted the book to be a book of portraiture,” Bullwinkel shares. Like all successful portraiture, the fighter snapshots in Headshot offer detailed likenesses that swiftly but succinctly tell us who each girl is. One girl romanticizes the red indentations her gym shorts left on her stomach because “they seemed like evidence of work she’d done.” Another imagines her opponent punching her head so hard and “the center of her brain becoming a bloody flower.” Another uses a break to kiss her palms together in fake prayer so people can’t see she’s really assessing her surroundings like a seasoned war veteran.

Bullwinkel’s sentences have well developed musculature; each builds onto the other, generating enough torque and power to land like a finely choreographed punch.

Like these girls, the author spent her teen years in competitive youth athletics. She sacrificed twenty hours a week to train as a water polo player, overcame a broken nose and fingers and eventually co-captained a Division I team. The experience — grueling, unheralded — served as fertile research for this book.

“I happened upon this trove of YouTube training videos that young women would take of themselves so they could watch the way their form changed over time,” Bullwinkel shares. “These were long, unedited videos that had two or three views. They were not meant for mass consumption. It was a way to document in a very small community the way your right hook was getting better or atrophying, for instance.”

These virtual artifacts unlocked a memory and a connection to her own past: “I have these memories of watching hours and hours and hours of footage of myself. … I saw a lot of parallels in the insular, claustrophobic nature of that world and my own experience.”

This insularity — which Bullwinkel defines as a world where “the stakes of everything are only known by the other people you’re competing against” — is key to the novel’s success. At the boxing gym where the Daughters of America Cup is held, the audience is bare. The local reporter sent to cover the event usually covers obituaries. The novel squeezes everything into tight focus: eight specific girls, a centralized location, a single tournament. Even the realization of boxing’s eventual irrelevance to their adult lives lends heat to the spotlight illuminating the action in the ring and shapes Headshot into a stunningly empathetic work of portraiture.

Bullwinkel’s debut novel is a dynamic ode to girlhood and its insatiable stamina. She hopes the book “is about what it means to be human and have a memory regardless of your gender,” but notes that it is also, specifically, “about the experience of doing something as a young woman that society at large just is not interested in.” “I think my question is, why do these young women do it?,” she says. “And I think it’s because I asked that question of myself: Why did I do it? My confusion about that is part of what interests me.”

Rita Bullwinkel will be in conversation with with Oscar Villalon at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco on March 13. Music by Theresa Wong, readings by Venita Blackburn, Jennifer Cheng and Ashley Nelson Levy.