Mad Metal Princess

Abstract

Mad Metal Princess follows the early and teen years of Leyla, a mixed girl who likes to dress up in black leather combat boots and line her eyes in thick layers of the blackest eyeliner. She emerges as a strange and socially awkward outcast until she is introduced to the public school environment after being homeschooled for most of her life. She is quickly pegged as the outcast of her peers and finds herself lost and alone in the early years of her life. These early pages showcase her relationship—or lack thereof—with her father, a typical maschista workaholic and alcoholic; her mother, a quiet and oblivious shut- in; and absent older sister. Left on her own most of the time, she begins to find herself in the hardcore metal scene where she quickly spirals into drugs, sex, and toxic relationships. Mad Metal Princess is a story about unapologetic femininity, depression, and Leyla’s tug-of- war with herself as she struggles to find happiness and acceptance in a world that seems to only want to chew her up and spit her out. This is the first seventy pages of what I anticipate to be a two-hundred-page novel.