The Only Girl in the Car: A Memoir - Softcover

Dobie, Kathy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385318839 ISBN 13: 9780385318839

Publisher: Bantam Dell, 2004

Synopsis

The Only Girl in the Car

Bookworm and dreamer, Kathy was a young girl with a tender heart, an adventurer's spirit, and a child's terrible confusion about her proper place in the world. As the oldest daughter in a family of six children, she seemed trapped in her role as Big Sister and Mommy's Helper. Then, one day, teetering on the brink of adolescence, hormones surging, she heard someone call her "cheesecake," and suddenly saw her path.

"Cheesecake, jailbait, sex kitten"--the very words seemed to be "doors opening" to a splendid new self. But from the moment she decides to lose her virginity and reels in her prey, a "full-grown man," fourteen-year-old Kathy is headed for trouble. One cold, raw March night some months later, parked in a car with four boys on the outskirts of her small suburban town, she finds it.

Though she could never have foreseen the outcome of that night, the "boys in the car could just as well have been Gypsies foretelling my future," she writes. Girls who break the rules in small towns like the one she lived in are expected to pay a very high price for their transgressions--and she did.

And yet...this young girl, as scrappy a protagonist as any in our literature, manages to transform her fate. The story of how she came to be in that car, and how she stepped out of it forever altered, to be sure, yet not forever damaged, is the theme of this extraordinary coming-of-age tale.

About this title

Review:

"This is the most honest, unflinching account of the sexuality of an adolescent girl I've ever read. Kathy Dobie treads fearlessly in that undiscovered country."
--Haven Kimmel author of A Girl Named Zippy

"Kathy Dobie writes a prose so fine that she leaves the reader breathless with pleasure."
--Richard Rodriguez

"The Only Girl in the Car is a memoir at its best--haunting honesty combined with literary grace. An impossible task, but this book accomplishes it, in a form so elegant as to seem effortless.... What a storyteller, and what a soul to tell it!"
--Jennifer Lauck, author of Blackbird

"The Only Girl in the Car is at once as comfortable as a dear friend and as terrifying as a dear friend's darkest secret. Open and honest and dignified, this is the memoir, often funny, always intelligent, of an era, of a family, but, most of all, of a remarkable and resilient girl's intimacy with her own mistakes."
--Cathleen Schine, author of Alice in Bed, The Love Letter, and The Evolution of Jane

Book Description:

'Riveting reading. As coming-of-age memoirs go, this is one of the best' - Marie Claire

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Dell
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385318839
• ISBN 13: 9780385318839
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240