Rachel Monroe

Monroe began her freelance journalism career in 2014; her first big story was "Fire Behavior", a profile of Bryce Reed, a local firefighter who came to public attention after the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. The story, which drew on Monroe's experience as a volunteer firefighter, was published by Oxford American in 2014.^[1][2] It was listed by The Cut in 2016 as one of the 56 best pieces of non-fiction by female writers and was listed as one of the best essays of the year by Longform and The Atlantic.^[2][6] Over the next two years, she wrote further true crime stories for Outside and Matter – the latter, titled "Have You Ever Thought About Killing Someone?" about Mike Baker's killing of Shannon Roberts in Big Bend National Park was nominated for a 2016 Livingston Award for national reporting.^[2][5][7] In 2015, she learned the poet Eileen Myles and her partner were moving to Marfa and Monroe interviewed them for New York magazine six months before Myles' partner, Joey Soloway, would publicly announce their relationship and write Myles as a character into the show Transparent.^[2]

Monroe has worked as a freelance writer for The New Yorker, New York, Slate, The New Republic, and The Guardian.^[1][2] In April 2017, she wrote a story for the New Yorker about two lifestyle influencers who were part of the #vanlife movement, Emily King and Corey Smith, and in October, she wrote another piece for the magazine about essential oils.^[2][8] That same year, she wrote an article for The Believer about bloggers who write about Charles Manson, titled "Outside the Manson Pinkberry", which was featured in the anthology The Best American Travel Writing 2018.^[4][9] Monroe wrote an article for Esquire in 2018 about the abduction and killing of a Navajo girl, Ashlynne Mike, for the 20th anniversary of the Amber alert.^[10] Later that year, she published an article in Outside about the National Park Service's Investigative Services Branch.^[11]

Monroe contributed a chapter to the non-fiction anthology Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession edited by Sarah Weinman in 2020, titled "The Perfect Man Who Wasn't".^[12] She also worked as a paid consultant on the 2020 Netflix series (Un)well, and appeared in the episode on essential oils.^[13] She was hired as a contributing writer for The New Yorker in December 2021.^[14] In 2022, she hosted the podcast Lost at Sea for BBC Radio 5, which covered the disappearance of the fisheries observer Keith Davis off the coast of Peru.^[15]

On August 20, 2019, Monroe published her debut non-fiction book Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession with Scribner.^[16][17] The essay collection concerns four women who were affected by true crime – the heiress Frances Glessner Lee who created miniature models of crime scenes which became the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death; the film director Alisa Statman, who moved to Cielo Drive and became obsessed with the Tate–LaBianca murders, eventually writing a book about it; the landscape architect Lorri Davis who married Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three; and Lindsay Souvannarath, who met a young man online with whom she perpetrated the Halifax mass shooting plot.^[3][16] The book received positive reviews and was named one of the best books of the year by Esquire and Jezebel, and received an honorable mention from the Chicago Tribune.^[18][19][20]

• Interview with Longform Podcast