Quantum Girl Theory is a novel about the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a freshman at Bennington College, who left the campus one December afternoon in 1946 to take a walk in the woods and never came back.
The search for Paula Jean, a young white woman, held the attention of the nation for weeks, and theories about her blossomed: she eloped, she had amnesia, she took her own life, she died of exposure, she was murdered, she was abducted by “supernatural forces.”
In Quantum Girl Theory, queer author Erin Kate Ryan provides a fictional solution to the mystery—but without the usual deductive plotting.
In true crime and detective fiction, a missing girl story is often about the troubled yet brilliant detectives who attempt to unravel the crime. It’s about all the people left behind. And the missing girl is just a rickety portrait built of their memories and suspect motivations. Ryan’s debut novel leapfrogs over these tropes by centering the story on the experience of the missing girl—on the idea of safety betrayed—and by imagining not just one version of the life or death she disappeared into, but many. As she writes in the prologue, “Quantum Girl Theory: A missing girl’s potential life stamps a new world into being. All her paths are possible—they are happening all at once, and in symphony.”
In Ryan’s version of the Paula Jean Welden story, she is the lover of a poetry professor, she is a pony-riding circus showgirl, she is a medium searching for other missing girls—and she is all of these things and more, simultaneously. This approach allows Ryan to subvert the historical focus on missing white girls, creating queer identities among the many Paula Jeans and pulling in parallel storylines for black characters.
[Appeared in Tupelo Quarterly]
Pagani & Co. 