Box Girl: My Part Time Job as an Art Installation
In this coming-of-age memoir, Snellings, the eponymous Box Girl, works as a model in an art installation in a Los Angeles hotel lobby. Posing, scantily clad, in a clear box, Snellings may read, sleep, write, and even cry as long as she ignores her audience. While modeling, she sharply observes the hotel visitors and her odd place in a stew of reality, voyeurism, and objectification. Between her box musings, Snellings recounts the stops and starts of her post-collegiate life that brought her to this position. Short chapters serve as ­vignettes covering topics including her unpaid magazine internships; her earthquake fears; embarrassing insurance-commercial auditions; the richness of friendships made while tending tables; and her efforts to make it in L.A. without relying (much) on her privileged and eccentric East Coast family. The disconnected stories in her first book employ a self-effacing and wryly humorous young voice in the tenor of Sloan Crosley and Lena Dunham. A self-described slash (writer/model/waitress/actress), Snellings truthfully captures her tumultuous twenties, in which identity is fashioned and refashioned anew with each apartment, job, boyfriend, and haircut. --Lindsay Bosch