The article focuses on Molly O'Keefe's 2013 novel Wild Child and its setting in the fictional town of Bishop, Arkansas, exploring the impact of celebrity culture on personal identity and relationships. Topics include the novel's geographical and cultural context, the portrayal of individualism versus community, and the challenges characters face in finding authentic connections amid societal pressures.
---
Wild Child is a 2013 contemporary romance novel by author Molly Fader writing under the name Molly O’Keefe, the first book in the “Boys of Bishop” series that includes Never Been Kissed (2014), Between the Sheets (2014), and Indecent Proposal (2014). The series title comes from the setting of the first three books, the fictional town of Bishop, Arkansas, a struggling community located, according to the second book, in eastern Arkansas an “hour and a half drive” from Memphis; Brody Baxter, the main character of Never Been Kissed, specifically references “the smell of Bishop, Arkansas, in summer,” which “was mostly stink from the Mississippi and L’Anguille rivers” (O’Keefe 2014a, 42, 43). The L’Anguille River arises just north of Harrisburg on the western side of Crowley’s Ridge and empties into the St. Francis near Marianna, so the town could exist somewhere in either Poinsett, Cross, St. Francis, or Lee counties. Given that the population of the fictional Bishop is approximately 4,200 at the time Wild Child opens, Bishop might be functioning as a stand-in for Marianna, which had a 2010 population of 4,115 and which, like Bishop, had experienced a significant decline from previous censuses.
In Wild Child, Bishop is the site of a drama that exposes the corrosive effects of celebrity culture—specifically, how celebrity culture promotes an extreme ethic of individualism that undermines the context in which individuals exist, and thus their ability to discover their authentic selves and develop nurturing relationships with other people, whatever those relationships be: romance, friend, or fellow citizen. (25)
Here's the abstract:
---