Why I shared my stories of toxic relationships in Single and Psycho – guest post by Caroline Young
Posted on September 24, 2025
Did you ever find yourself siding with Killing Eve‘s Villanelle, or Fatal Attraction‘s Alex, even though you were clearly supposed to fear or loathe them?
When I started plotting out my idea for Single and Psycho, I was going through a tough time. Over the previous few years, I’d had several miscarriages and a failed round of IVF, and as a woman in my forties, I struggled with the realisation that life hadn’t turned out the way I’d imagined. I was angry, and I blamed myself for making bad decisions, and staying too long in a bad relationship because I was too afraid to walk away. I had let time slip away when I so wanted to have children.
I found solace in horror movies, because they delve into the dark side of human nature, they explore the grotesque, and like Rosemary’s Baby, they reflect the real discomfort and anxiety that many pregnant women experience. Feeling a bit psycho, and feeling the rage building up in me, I began to think about all those unhinged women of popular culture. I embraced the unstable single women like Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, Fleabag and even Villanelle in Killing Eve, because maybe it was easier not to care.
Even though I wanted to tell my story of grief, lost chances, toxic relationships and of being the stereotype of the chaotic messy woman, I really debated how much of my own life I should share, without it feeling too exposing. But I decided to blend it with cultural criticism, so I could add some deeper understanding to characters like Alex Forrest or Elizabeth Sparkle in The Substance. And I’d often felt a bit like accident-prone, hopeless-in-love Bridget Jones, whose perpetual dieting and quest for a stable love life was a bit too close to the bone.
Maybe it seems like a stretch to defend Alex in Fatal Attraction, but when you dive a bit deeper you find a woman struggling with expectations, and who has had it with being what Pablo Picasso would describe as a “doormat”. It was Alex’s psychotic actions that coined the phrase ‘bunny-boiler’ and since then it’s been a label for any woman who dares to ask for more. It’s just one of a long list of words and phrases used to keep women in their place: spinster, old maid, witch, single white female, childless cat lady…
Throughout the book I examine how single, childless women have long been labelled as deviant, desperate and dangerous. Think of Miss Havisham, “the witch of the place”, or those femme fatales slinking about in Film Noir. From the madwoman in the attic to Marilyn Monroe’s later persona as the tragic, ageing divorcée and Taylor Swift’s domination as a serial-dating, love-obsessed pop star (before she got engaged, of course!), pop culture has always held up a mirror to how society treats single women. Now, in the 2020s, as we face a backlash against #MeToo, we’re bombarded with male propaganda that women who step outside of societal conventions are deviant and destined only for lonely spinsterhood. With trad wives pitted against childless cat ladies, the pushback against abortions, and similar misogynistic messages, pop culture is becoming an outlet for female rage.
By sharing some of my stories, my hope for Single & Psycho is that it might connect with other women who put up with bad behaviour for fear of being labelled a bunny-boiler, and who are burdened with the awful feeling that time might be running out. There is so much pressure to meet life’s deadlines, and I want this book to give women a moment to have fun with the stereotypes.
Single and Psycho: How pop culture created the unstable single woman publishes on the 25th September 2025.
Caroline Young is the author of several books, including The It Girls: Glamor, Celebrity, and Scandal, Hitchcock’s Heroines, and Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror, which was nominated for both the Rondo Hatton Award and Richard Wall Memorial Award.
