Kellye Garrett’s fourth novel, Missing White Woman (Mulholland, Apr. 2024), opens with a Black woman named Bree arriving at an Airbnb for a romantic, luxurious New York City vacation with her workaholic new boyfriend, Ty. The next morning, she wakes up to find Ty gone and a previously missing white influencer dead on the stairs. Garrett spoke with PW about whose stories matter online.
Bree feels an affinity for the murdered influencer, Janelle Beckett, saying they’re both victims “at the mercy of strangers’ assumptions.” What does this mean?
People see you and they’re going to judge you. Sometimes there are stereotypes that people have to deal with, both good and bad. People are judging Janelle, and what they think is a bad decision she made: she went out at night by herself. Bree sees it as people making assumptions, the way they’ve made assumptions about Bree in the past.
In one scene, a TikTok user named Billie makes videos calling for answers on Janelle’s disappearance. How does influencer culture play into the plot?
When I was writing this, the Gabby Petito murder happened. I was as fascinated as the entire country was. When I wanted to find out what was happening, I looked at Twitter, or X, or whatever you want to call it, rather than the news. A couple of influencers were giving updates on Gabby, and it wasn’t clear if they were helping or hurting the investigation. In the book, influencers tweet and make videos about any rumor they hear. Billie has become the go-to source, but she doesn’t care if she’s accurate; there’s no fact-checking. By the time a video is proven wrong, she’s moved on to the next.
What happens when internet sleuths start inserting themselves into investigations?
They can bring attention to stories that might not otherwise get attention; Billie takes credit for that. But because they don’t care about accuracy, it’s easy for the wrong information to go viral. I’ve been guilty of it too; I see something on Twitter and I’m so mad about it and later it turns out not to be true. Just because something has a hundred thousand likes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. It’s so easy to forget that there are people behind other computer screens or phones. People say things on the internet they’d never say to someone’s face. You have to remember: this was a murder, someone died, their family is hurting—and we’re treating it like a fun thing to talk about on the internet.
What’s the significance of the book’s title?
Missing white woman syndrome describes when a woman who’s a pretty, blonde, all-American stereotype goes missing and gets lots of attention. Meanwhile, so many Indigenous women are missing, so many Black women, and they get so little. Carlee Russell [a Black woman who admitted to faking her own kidnapping] went missing and it got attention because it was such a strange story; she pulled off the highway, called 911, and took off, saying she saw an abandoned toddler on the shoulder. All these women are important, but mostly the white ones get media attention.
