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Bee Reaved
A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment.
So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.
—Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture"
This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale; and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When The Sick Rule The World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.
So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.
—Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture"
This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale; and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When The Sick Rule The World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.
- GenresEssaysNonfictionMemoir
240 pages, Paperback
First published October 19, 2021
20 people are currently reading
378 people want to read
About the author
Dodie Bellamy
38 books183 followersDodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling.
She ist married to Kevin Killian.
She ist married to Kevin Killian.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
November 23, 2025
read this book in a day on the plane, cried. can’t stop thinking about that image at the very end of the ending essay — kevin hovering above dodie, arms framing her face, bodies casually touching. it’s such a miracle to be in love.
November 18, 2021
Dodie Bellamy is a national treasure.
August 7, 2022
bee reaved's excess gives me permission to explode with foam and froth of memories and childlike fits of living in a world of constant grief and trash. dodie bellamy unzips a suitcase of kept files, mundane walks around the neighborhood or whatever, insecure thoughts of stalkers and internet mourners, gofund me pages and youtube searches, shit stuck to the intricate grooves of shoes. "kevin and dodie" destroyed me. a conversation between two alive writers always nourishes me, talking about topics they both cared about, speaking back and forth about art shows they've attended and childhood sexual experiences. there is an abruptness of kevin's illness. the hospital room arrives and in the conversation, kevin no longer speaks. i have been in this hospital room before, in other forms, in my own life. everything breaks off. it's true, if we survive this car chase (the world) it is a miracle in its own. we are lurching forward with all our might, crashing, spinning, loving.
January 5, 2022
This is like a 4.5? I didn't know what to expect here, had never read any Bellamy, did not know her partner, did not know what the book was about but the whole book surprised me. Usually I don't like essays on art I don't see but the writing is so accessible without giving up any depth. Then the final essay blew me away. Would suggest!!
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July 10, 2024not as good as when the sick rule the world, i liked the chapters at the end from the pov of bee reaved the most. i think my favorite dodie bellamy is when she's writing about her (or bee's lol) life and peppers it with digressions into gossip, theory, etc., whereas some of the earlier essays are more criticism/theory-forward which is good but not as salaciously readable to me and quintessentially dodie to me. i love dodie. i need to read kevin killian. also feeling big thanks for leaving this book out on the table and now it means i am meeting a cool poet. dodie is the best
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February 7, 2024Somehow I lost this sometime between NYE and now. This keeps happening to me and I have no idea how. If anyone finds it on the MTA give me a holler lol. I got about three quarters of the way through and had very mixed feelings. Hopefully I'll get my hands on another copy and finish it soon but for now...¯\_(ツ)_/¯
xxx
Found it! My losing and finding of this book seems very relevant to the atmosphere it gives off, or at least to my experience of it. Still have mixed feelings. It definitely got better as it went along and the last essay is undeniably the best.
P.S: I believed up until now that a good writer can write successfully about any subject. This book taught me that no writer can write well about Shane Dawson. I mean seriously...I understand that mundane experience is an integral part of grief, but I do not ever want to encounter Youtuber drama in a book. Ever!
xxx
Found it! My losing and finding of this book seems very relevant to the atmosphere it gives off, or at least to my experience of it. Still have mixed feelings. It definitely got better as it went along and the last essay is undeniably the best.
P.S: I believed up until now that a good writer can write successfully about any subject. This book taught me that no writer can write well about Shane Dawson. I mean seriously...I understand that mundane experience is an integral part of grief, but I do not ever want to encounter Youtuber drama in a book. Ever!
January 25, 2022
the new narrative Year of Magical Thinking - Dodie writes so candidly and immediately, messily yet so insightfully about grief and love and culture.
October 12, 2023
I wanted to love this memoir, as you can feel Dodie's pain and how much she misses her husband, however I had issues with it. Mainly how Dodie or Doris Bellamy completely ignores the fact that her husband Kevin Killian is bisexual and she erases his bisexuality. Bisexual men get enough of this from both gay men and women and heterosexuals.
I lived in SF from 1990 until early 2013. I was friends with Kevin. We would see each other at various art, and poetry events around the city. Kevin told me how he is bisexual. I am a gay man. I know of no men who are out gay men or who are homosexual who actually fall in love with women, have sex with women, and marry women. Only bisexual men do this and only bisexual men have sexual and romantic attraction to both women and men.
I lived in SF from 1990 until early 2013. I was friends with Kevin. We would see each other at various art, and poetry events around the city. Kevin told me how he is bisexual. I am a gay man. I know of no men who are out gay men or who are homosexual who actually fall in love with women, have sex with women, and marry women. Only bisexual men do this and only bisexual men have sexual and romantic attraction to both women and men.
May 23, 2023
Acute observation, searing honesty, and a quirky, pithy, earthy, gossipy writing style combine to make these essays a joy to read... even when they tear your heart out. Bellamy has mastered the art of weaving utterly disparate narratives into a single thread, shifting focus abruptly within a single paragraph but in a way that illuminates rather than confuses. It's pretty spectacular! As an added bonus, fans of the inimitable Kevin Killian will find his delightful presence suffusing these pages.
August 8, 2024
At times, it is as though Bellamy stretched a topic to it’s limit, like Let It Go YouTube videos, or the action packed chase scene, or the unpleasant reality of her cat defecating in every corner of the house. Each piece was an interplay of several art forms, aesthetics and/or emotional realms. An array of art criticism, self-consciousness, disavowal, shame, internet culture, and social and economic class. These essays had me laughing and sobbing.
January 28, 2023
the opening essays vary somewhat in potency and i maybe i would appreciate the relationship between them and the development of the book towards total occupation with kevin's death (where it becomes total gold) on a re-read, because the connection between the parts/development didn't strike me as urgently meaningful the first time round. i also find that when bellamy's writing becomes straightforwardly feminist (or is didactic the word?) it becomes kind of pedestrian and totally lacking the conceptual breadth and feminist verve embodied in her more experimental or genre prose. nevertheless when the book is good it is, as usual, profoundly satisfying. electric and delicious and cathartic and funny and sprawling
February 10, 2025
I finished this book with the urge to go back to the beginning. To read Kevin alive one more time. To appreciate Dodie’s craft even more. This book has a pulse and it bleeds. I borrowed it from the library but now I want it to be always near.
December 31, 2023
++
Kevin loved musicals. His core sense of sanity was so fragile he needed to believe the world was as beautiful and glorious as a musical.
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Kevin loved musicals. His core sense of sanity was so fragile he needed to believe the world was as beautiful and glorious as a musical.
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February 7, 2024Thanks dodie Bellamy for writing about frozen and greys anatomy . Less charmed by this one than the others idk why
March 21, 2024
amazin amazin love dodie love kevin killian only not a 5 stars cuz a couple of the essays were bad but others were wonderful
December 13, 2024
i hope to love someone someday as amorally, constantly, and beautifully as dodie and kevin loved each other. maybe an unpopular opinion but i loved this one maybe more than when the sick
April 18, 2025
I’m wrecked
July 30, 2025
Last two texts will stay with me forever. I cried multiple times while reading them. I can’t stop thinking about the last text. Thank you Dodie!
February 7, 2024
Bee Reaved is my second Dodie Bellamy, after Letters of Mina Harker. Actually, it's my third after her amazing short story, Days Without Someone, which was featured in an anthology of 80s short fiction and was easily my favorite story in that collection. I had also heard of her prior to that book, mentioned casually by some authors I love and some I don't, so when I discovered in this book that she was actually less famous than her husband, I was shocked given that I hadn't heard of him before reading that anthology and his story left me out in the cold, which is a trend that continued with his writing.
I've also been really enjoying books and memoirs about grief, and so I loved the parts of this that dealt explicitly with that. Specifically, I loved the parts about her dealing with the death of a husband that was more famous or significant than her, and seeing tributes to him by people he had artistic beef with prior to his death or who openly said they didn't like his writing, and the general sense of feeling like she no longer "owned", I guess, the memory of her dead husband, and how little she felt remembered in those tributes. It's something I always hated about celebrity tributes, when people seem to forget about their less-famous spouses and children, as if the public owns their memory- I remember when Norm Macdonald died, my favorite comedian and one of the only celebrity deaths to ever actually made me sad, and how few people remembered to mention his son in their tributes to him.
There are other essays in this that don't have as much to do with grief that I liked, too. Her discussion of the whole conception of being canceled was interesting, though I'm, to date, not entirely sure what the drama she refers to that resulted in her cancellation is about, and Google turns up nothing so I'm equally not as sure if it even really happened in the first place. This all, for the record, happened in like 2016-2017 which was the peak of that stupidity and back then I was in high school and forcing myself to like YA fantasy and the underground, alt lit/poetry scene was the furthest thing possible from my wheelhouse at the time so of course I would have no idea about any Facebook drama that would have happened then. For the record, though, I'm not one of those people who thinks cancel culture isn't real, you'd have to be a fucking idiot or in a coma during the late 2010s to not think it was, especially in the terminally online book world when they were pulling books from publication left and right because one person wrote a "yikes guys" review about an ARC on Goodreads and everyone piled on and people were frantically editing their positive reviews of certain books so they wouldn't get dog-piled by the deranged. But anyway, speaking of being canceled...
I cannot describe to you how insane it was to read a collection of essays written by a 60-something year old woman who is talking, in earnest, about Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star. This is not an insult in any way towards Dodie Bellamy, but as someone who was, like seventeen through twenty when Shane Dawson became Youtube's beloved son and beauty gurus like Jeffree Star were running the scene, all of that stuff seemed so quintessionally zoomer culture that it's wild to know that a childless woman in her sixties consumed the same kind of content that we did. Well, okay, that my peers did, Shane Dawson always hit my "get the fuck away from me" button and I don't wear make-up or have any interest in it so I never watched beauty gurus unless Jenna Marbles counted, but I fucking love drama when it doesn't have anything to do with me, and so I followed Dramaggedon and its 2020 sequel with great interest (though the 2020 sequel made me sad because we lost Jenna Marbles). Also, again, it was my generation, and if you were in your teens/very early twenties during either of those times, you had to follow that drama or you'd have nothing to talk about during lunch or before class or with your close-in-age siblings, it was a bonding experience. So it's odd to think that, again, a childless woman older than my parents would follow that, too, and I'm not entirely sure why I think that but maybe you understand. I mean, my mom knew the details but that's because she lived with my sister and I. I don't know where I'm going with this.
I'm sorry, I wrote this review after drinking an entire can of Brisk Iced Tea at 10:30 at night.
I've also been really enjoying books and memoirs about grief, and so I loved the parts of this that dealt explicitly with that. Specifically, I loved the parts about her dealing with the death of a husband that was more famous or significant than her, and seeing tributes to him by people he had artistic beef with prior to his death or who openly said they didn't like his writing, and the general sense of feeling like she no longer "owned", I guess, the memory of her dead husband, and how little she felt remembered in those tributes. It's something I always hated about celebrity tributes, when people seem to forget about their less-famous spouses and children, as if the public owns their memory- I remember when Norm Macdonald died, my favorite comedian and one of the only celebrity deaths to ever actually made me sad, and how few people remembered to mention his son in their tributes to him.
There are other essays in this that don't have as much to do with grief that I liked, too. Her discussion of the whole conception of being canceled was interesting, though I'm, to date, not entirely sure what the drama she refers to that resulted in her cancellation is about, and Google turns up nothing so I'm equally not as sure if it even really happened in the first place. This all, for the record, happened in like 2016-2017 which was the peak of that stupidity and back then I was in high school and forcing myself to like YA fantasy and the underground, alt lit/poetry scene was the furthest thing possible from my wheelhouse at the time so of course I would have no idea about any Facebook drama that would have happened then. For the record, though, I'm not one of those people who thinks cancel culture isn't real, you'd have to be a fucking idiot or in a coma during the late 2010s to not think it was, especially in the terminally online book world when they were pulling books from publication left and right because one person wrote a "yikes guys" review about an ARC on Goodreads and everyone piled on and people were frantically editing their positive reviews of certain books so they wouldn't get dog-piled by the deranged. But anyway, speaking of being canceled...
I cannot describe to you how insane it was to read a collection of essays written by a 60-something year old woman who is talking, in earnest, about Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star. This is not an insult in any way towards Dodie Bellamy, but as someone who was, like seventeen through twenty when Shane Dawson became Youtube's beloved son and beauty gurus like Jeffree Star were running the scene, all of that stuff seemed so quintessionally zoomer culture that it's wild to know that a childless woman in her sixties consumed the same kind of content that we did. Well, okay, that my peers did, Shane Dawson always hit my "get the fuck away from me" button and I don't wear make-up or have any interest in it so I never watched beauty gurus unless Jenna Marbles counted, but I fucking love drama when it doesn't have anything to do with me, and so I followed Dramaggedon and its 2020 sequel with great interest (though the 2020 sequel made me sad because we lost Jenna Marbles). Also, again, it was my generation, and if you were in your teens/very early twenties during either of those times, you had to follow that drama or you'd have nothing to talk about during lunch or before class or with your close-in-age siblings, it was a bonding experience. So it's odd to think that, again, a childless woman older than my parents would follow that, too, and I'm not entirely sure why I think that but maybe you understand. I mean, my mom knew the details but that's because she lived with my sister and I. I don't know where I'm going with this.
I'm sorry, I wrote this review after drinking an entire can of Brisk Iced Tea at 10:30 at night.
February 20, 2024
Only rating it 5 in hopes more people get hip to her work.
Because …
1.) Dodie is awesome! She can be funny, tragic, raw, Insightful and is always fascinating to read when she commands language.
2.) A star rating system just seems inappropriate for this collection. Her loved one passed away and it just seems off putting to rate something “out of 5” in the wake of actual real-life grief. Which is the major through-line to her latest collection of essays.
A collection worth checking out.
Because …
1.) Dodie is awesome! She can be funny, tragic, raw, Insightful and is always fascinating to read when she commands language.
2.) A star rating system just seems inappropriate for this collection. Her loved one passed away and it just seems off putting to rate something “out of 5” in the wake of actual real-life grief. Which is the major through-line to her latest collection of essays.
A collection worth checking out.
August 3, 2022
i love dodie bellamy. soberingly distraught while simultaneously lifting your spirits. poignant and taught writing while also a gift to read.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews