I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' - John Jeremiah Sullivan This is an extraordinary, complex portrait of 'white girls,' an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures more diverse than you might think. With blazing intelligence and insight, Als travels through the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Michel Basquiat and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have led us to where we are today. White Girls is one of the most provocative and original books about the culture of our time.