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
"
"From the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
"Cheesecake, jailbait, sex kitten" - the very words seemed to "open doors" to a powerful, sexy new self. But from the moment she decides to lose her virginity and reels in her prey, a "full-grown man", 14-year-old Kathy is headed for trouble. One cold, raw March night some months later, in a car with four boys she thought were friends, she finds it. This is her story, told with frightening detachment, honesty and lack of self-pity. Full of raw emotion, humour, horror, it simply tells it how it was - as the eldest of six children in a liberal enough close-knit Catholic family, with rebellious brothers, a young exhausted mother, and a glamorous father whom she idolised. In the spring of her 14th year suddenly "the earth blossomed with men and boys - they were everywhere" and "a halter top went straight to the point; it started its own conversations. Wearing one was as good as having a personality." But girls who breaks rules in small towns like the one she lived in are expected to pay a high price for their transgressions - and she did. That fateful year culminated in a gang rape. How she stepped out of that car, forever altered, to be sure, but not forever damaged, how she learned to fight back, even to wear her stigma with a perverse pride, is the other part of the story she tells. Always aware that her ambitions were bigger and more complicated than those of the suburbs where she grew up, Kathy was determined to come through, and the reader, drawn deep into her story, has a stake in the outcome.
