Run Like a Girl is a collection of essays that examines the manifestations of fear through girlhood and into womanhood. The initial fear of losing her mother prompts in Pipkin a chain of fears: androphobia, horror delusions, body dysmorphia, and mental instability. In the essay “Dreaming in Dog Years,” Pipkin is introduced to “good girls” and “bad girls,” and what such identities mean for her and her mother’s endings according to horror movies. While some girls don’t survive, others are able to run. Pipkin and her mother’s shared obsession—running—is explored from various angles. In “The Sunflower Project” and “Mother Moon & Me,” Pipkin runs in response to fears of an abusive biological father. Essays such as “Run Like a Girl” and “Where There Should Be Blood” acknowledge the pitfalls of endurance running. Pipkin examines societal pressures around weight, social media imagery, and motherhood, and discusses how these pressures affect young girls taught to run. At the heart of the collection is a testament of love. The collection ends with “A Conversation with My Mother’s Journal,” where Pipkin explores mental health and reconciles her antipathy towards her mother through journal entries. The essay provides readers with her mother’s own words, fulfilling her mother’s unrealized aspiration of writing memoir.

“For girls, running is expected. We’re told what we do is run scared; that flight takes precedent over fight. We run like girls. We’re not to be those girls—we’re to be good girls, horror movies’ final girls. Rather than running with the wolves, we run away. We’re to be soft, but hide our softness in turtlenecks and shapeless clothes. We’re to reject attention, and invert into ourselves, into our bones, which build haunted houses of domesticated loneliness. We’re to sustain goosebumps, keeping ourselves alert to dangers those girls wouldn’t see. Couldn’t see. Of our friends, we’re to be quiet leaders because a voice would make us bitches; we’re to outthink the others—out run others—only to turn and watch them, those girls, perish. We were to survive the horror.”