Stay Sexy & Don''t Get Murdered

How do you live boldly, kindly, and safely in a world that often tells women to be small, polite, and quiet? In Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, comedians and podcasters Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark transform their cult-favorite true crime podcast My Favorite Murder into a raw, funny, and deeply personal guide to surviving modern womanhood. This book isn’t just a collection of grisly stories—it’s an unflinchingly honest memoir about anxiety, trauma, self-worth, and the small rebellions that make a woman whole.

At its core, Kilgariff and Hardstark argue that empowerment is inseparable from boundaries. They want you to fuck politeness—to stop prioritizing other people’s comfort over your own safety or truth. But they also want you to laugh, to heal, to make peace with your past, and to know that strength doesn’t mean perfection. Through alternating essays and conversations, they trace how early experiences with fear, trauma, and shame shaped them—and how they learned to turn survival into self-compassion.

Two Voices, One Mission

Karen and Georgia’s voices differ but harmonize beautifully. Karen grew up in Northern California with a nurse mother whose relentless honesty inspired the “fuck politeness” mantra. Georgia, a self-described anxious “sweet baby angel,” struggled with addiction and self-doubt in Orange County’s perfectionist suburbs before escaping to Los Angeles. Each chapter riff from their podcast—Stay out of the Forest, Don’t Be a Fucking Lunatic—becomes a window into their experiences, with sidebars of banter and intimate Q&As that feel like sitting in the backseat of a moving, hilarious therapy session.

Comedy Meets Care

While built on the duo’s love of true crime, the book’s real heart is its self-help-through-honesty philosophy. They use humor not to trivialize trauma but to dismantle its power. Like Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened or Roxane Gay’s Hunger, their jokes coexist with confession. Kilgariff’s essay on watching her mother fade from Alzheimer’s is both devastating and darkly funny; Hardstark’s story about a creepy “photographer” encounter becomes an anatomy of female conditioning and survival instinct. They remind readers that laughter isn’t escapism—it’s resistance.

The Murderino Ethos

If the podcast gave rise to a community of “Murderinos”—fans who bond over gallows humor and empowerment through caution—the book gives them a manifesto. “Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered” becomes shorthand for living fully while staying aware. It means loving yourself fiercely, saying no loudly, and finding connection in vulnerability. Themes like mental health, addiction recovery, feminism, and friendship weave through the crime jokes, reminding readers that self-preservation and joy are deeply radical acts.

Across eight themed chapters, Karen and Georgia explore everything from childhood dysfunction and latchkey independence to therapy revelations and feminist rage. Every tale—whether about stealing earrings, crashing cars, or overcoming shame—builds toward one message: you are worth protecting. Through relatable confessions and a lot of laughter, they create a survival guide for anyone learning to trust their gut, reclaim self-respect, and live without apology.

One of the book’s most famous slogans, “fuck politeness,” isn’t about rudeness—it’s about reclaiming your agency. Both Georgia and Karen learned the hard way that politeness can be dangerous, especially for women socialized to accommodate others’ needs even in threatening situations. They argue that survival often means overriding the pressure to be likable.

Georgia’s Story: Red Flags and Survival

Georgia recalls being a nineteen-year-old waitress in Santa Monica when a regular customer—a seemingly nice older man named Lawrence—asked to photograph her. Flattered and eager, she agreed, ignoring multiple red flags: getting into his car, driving to a secluded mountain spot, and posing as he grew increasingly predatory. When he finally asked her to take her top off, she realized she’d ignored her instincts because she didn’t want to seem “rude.” That fear of being impolite nearly cost her safety. The experience taught her that intuition isn’t paranoia—it’s protection.

Georgia’s tale parallels countless true crime cases she and Karen discuss on their podcast—women like Linda Sobek and Janice Ott, who trusted the wrong men because social conditioning told them to. (In Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, politeness is a virtue; here, it’s a vice when it silences survival instinct.) Georgia’s takeaway: trust your gut first; apologize never.

Karen’s Lesson: Honesty Over Comfort

Karen elaborates with a portrait of her mother, Patricia, a psychiatric nurse and rule-breaker who embodied “fuck politeness.” Her mom spoke uncomfortable truths and called out injustice, raising her daughters to value honesty over decorum. Through humor and compassion, Karen shows that being assertive isn’t cruelty—it’s clarity. Honesty can be an act of kindness when it prevents deeper harm or resentment.

Together, their stories underscore that politeness without boundaries feeds danger and resentment. Kindness, by contrast, respects both self and others. The mantra becomes feminist armor, urging you to speak up, say no, and protect yourself—even if it feels impolite.

The second theme, introduced with Georgia’s whimsical term “sweet baby angel,” explores innocence, self-compassion, and the messy business of growing up. Every person, they argue, starts as a sweet baby angel—pure and hopeful—but life chips away at that purity. The goal is to rediscover empathy without losing self-awareness.

Healing Through Self-Care

Karen’s essay “Self-Care Isn’t About You” reframes the trendy concept. Instead of bubble baths and yoga, she defines self-care as “not being a dick”—to yourself or your friends. Drawing from her therapy experiences and addiction recovery, she describes how caring for yourself is actually a social act: it prevents you from inflicting your pain onto others. Like Brené Brown’s call for vulnerability in Daring Greatly, she sees self-care as a lifelong practice of honesty, accountability, and connection.

Georgia’s Story: Finding Salvation in Books

In her chapter “Georgia Gets Her Nipple Pierced for All the Right Reasons,” she tracks her transformation from teen delinquent to artist through reading. Growing up in restrictive Orange County, she turned to Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles for escape, learning that weirdness could be strength. Her love of literature became a blueprint for saving herself. When she met Bradbury as a teen and received a signed book inscribed “Onward!”, she recognized self-creation as the ultimate act of care.

Being a “sweet baby angel,” then, isn’t about naivety—it’s about preserving compassion after hardship. For both authors, real self-care means raising your emotional literacy and protecting your inner child instead of abandoning them.

This chapter explores how charisma and belonging can become traps. Karen uses the metaphor of Hollywood itself as a seductive cult—a place promising fame but often delivering exploitation and self-loathing. The antidote, she says, is to keep your “clutch five”—a handful of people who keep you grounded when you lose perspective.

Karen’s Hollywood Revelation

As a struggling writer and performer, Karen recalls being tempted by every promise of quick success, comparing the entertainment industry to Scientology’s Celebrity Centre. Both promise validation but demand your identity in return. Her therapist advised limiting her inner circle to “five people who would drive you to the airport”—a simple but profound guideline for trust. Real safety, she learned, comes from intimacy, not institutions.

Georgia’s Story: Kleptomania and a Father’s Forgiveness

Georgia provides the emotional mirror. Her teenage stealing habit ended when she was caught shoplifting earrings. Too scared to call her strict mother, she turned to her father, whose compassion—and tears—taught her that accountability can coexist with unconditional love. The chapter’s title comes from this dynamic: when you’re in too deep, emotionally or physically, call the person who loves you enough to pull you out. It’s both literal parenting advice and spiritual guidance against manipulation.

Ultimately, “You’re in a Cult, Call Your Dad” reminds readers that love, not shame, is what rescues us from self-destruction. Whether the cult is fame, addiction, or perfectionism, connection is the path home.

This provocatively titled chapter confronts mental health head-on, blending comedy with candor. Both authors use personal reckoning—Karen with addiction, Georgia with therapy—to illustrate how self-awareness can save your life.

Karen’s Sobriety and Self-Respect

Karen takes readers through her drinking and drug years, culminating in seizures and a hospital visit that forced her to quit. She admits how much she loved chaos—the “party hot tub” that eventually became a swamp. Her insight mirrors the psychology in Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream: addiction isn’t about weakness but disconnection. Karen reframes sobriety as creative survival: facing the world clear-eyed, however painful, is the real rebellion.

Georgia’s Therapy Epiphanies

Georgia’s “Top Ten Holy Shit Moments in Therapy” enumerates hard-won wisdom: be kind to little you; motivation isn’t necessary—just act; don’t worship at the altar of doubt. Her therapist’s mantra “It’s OK” becomes her internal antidote to panic. These stories, alternately hilarious and heartfelt, demystify therapy as an elite luxury and portray it as maintenance for the human condition. Like Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Georgia shows how self-reflection can turn shame into tools for growth.

The lesson: mental stability isn’t a fixed state—it’s a commitment to catching yourself with humor, empathy, and help before you spiral.

If earlier chapters tackle internal safety, these focus on independence. Kilgariff and Hardstark argue that self-sufficiency—financial, emotional, creative—is survival. Earning your keep and owning your choices means fewer people can manipulate you.

Working on Yourself (and at the Gap)

Karen narrates her years of low-wage jobs—from cleaning horse stalls to enduring retail horror at the Gap and chasing stand-up dreams. She dismantles the myth of overnight success: each humiliating experience forged grit and empathy. In her father’s advice and her grandmother’s encouragement—“You did it without knowing anybody!”—she finds validation through effort, not status. Her career arcs from unpaid PA to TV writer, then back to creative rebirth through their podcast—proof that persistence, not perfection, pays off.

Georgia’s Rule: Earn First, Dream Boldly

Georgia’s work timeline—coffee shop shifts, vintage store gigs, and cubicle misery—culminates in a leap of faith: quitting her desk job to create My Favorite Murder. She insists her courage wasn’t grandiose; it was logical self-compassion. “Bigger dummies than you” became her life motto—a reminder that worth doesn’t hinge on elite credentials. Like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, Georgia celebrates creativity as an accessible act of risk-taking. Her career pivot proves that buying your own shit means building your own life, even if it means failing spectacularly first.

Their combined message: work isn’t about status, it’s about sovereignty. Earn money, own your stuff, and no one else controls your narrative.

The book’s closing mantra, “stay out of the forest,” began as literal safety advice and evolved into existential guidance. The “forest” symbolizes danger—external threats and internal chaos alike. Kilgariff and Hardstark teach readers that while life’s forest can’t be avoided, awareness helps you navigate it safely.

Georgia’s Loss and Empathy

In her section, Georgia recounts a terrifying childhood moment when her brother went missing on a camping trip. Imagining his death, she confronted both literal fear—the wild unknown—and emotional fear—loss and helplessness. Years later, that fear matures into empathy for real victims and their families, like in the heartbreaking story of Michele Wallace, whose murder led to the creation of the forensic group NecroSearch. Georgia connects her fascination with true crime to a mission of compassion: remembering that behind every case is a web of survivors learning to live with grief.

Karen’s Lesson on Victim Blaming

Karen addresses the social “forest”: cultural victim blaming. Using a Canadian case where police chastised rape victims for being out late, she dismantles the logic of blaming survivors instead of perpetrators. Quoting activist Jackson Katz, she urges society to rewrite the narrative: men commit violence; women experience it. Safety advice should empower, not shame. Her reflection reframes true crime itself—as an opportunity for education, empathy, and advocacy, not morbid fascination.

By the end, “stay out of the forest” means more than self-defense. It means vigilance without paranoia, compassion without cynicism, and refusing to let fear shrink your life. Awareness—paired with humor and community—is the light guiding every Murderino home.