Oh my, I’ve been neglecting this poor website. Pretty much all my links to TV are outdated, or you can’t access the videos anymore.

Maybe if I stopped spending all my time on Facebook I’d be a more productive person…something to think about.

Meanwhile, getting ready for Loose Girl’s paperback release in June. Stay tuned.

The Guttmacher Institute came out this week with evidence that teens are not replacing intercourse with oral sex. Their study suggests teens who have oral sex are already having intercourse.

“When the researchers examined the timing of sexual behaviors, they found that among those who said during face-to-face interviews that had had vaginal sex in the past six months, 82 percent said they also had had oral sex, compared with 26 percent of the virgins.

Among those who had initiated vaginal sex more than three years earlier, 92 percent had engaged in oral sex. ”

The study provides evidence that “oral sex parties” are less pervasive than we think. Commenters argue that the study suggests the need for better sex education among teens… again. All it tells me is that teens are heading full tilt into sex, ho holds barred, which isn’t really news. This wouldn’t have to be a bad thing, of course. Adolescence is a perfectly natural time to explore sexually. But my guess is that many more girls than we think are having sex for reasons that go well beyond pleasure and curiosity, and instead are doing whatever it takes to get boys to think they’re desirable.

Sex education can’t just include “facts” – diagrams of genitals and information about STDs and birth control. We must begin to discuss with teens the reasons for sex in an honest, culpable manner.

Yesterday, my editor called to ask me for some proof. She offered her sincerest apologies. She made clear that she didn’t question my memoir’s veracity. But, thanks to another Oregon memoirist, suddenly everyone else wants evidence that my story is actually my story.

It’s bad enough that my readers might not trust me, all because some greedy nutjob tried to put one over on them. What’s worse is that I can’t really prove my story. I sent my editor my diplomas. I asked my sister to send an email saying, “Yes, Kerry wrote our family’s story, for real.” I have a few photos, I guess. But, short of trying to contact boys from my past, I have no way to prove any of it. Add to this that those boys may not remember me, or they may remember things differently. Thinking about this doesn’t matter anyway because I have no idea where any of them are. Hell, I can barely remember most of their names!

And trying to prove my story, although fruitless, is much less difficult than, say, a memoirist who’s been sexually abused trying to prove hers. Should we ask Sue William Silverman, who wrote about how her father molested her throughout most of her childhood in Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, to prove that she was molested? How should we do this? Ask her father, who would certainly deny her accounts? What about Julie Gregory’s Sickened, in which she recounts the ways in which her mother made her sick to garner attention for herself. Who could prove such a thing? Certainly not her mother. Certainly not the doctors, who treated a truly sickened little girl.

The problem with needing to “prove” memoirs, of course, is that memoirs are stories of memory. Judith Barrington, author of Writing the Memoir, reminds us that memory is not something we can track down, the way a journalist might need to track down a fact. They are, by nature, slippery and subjective. Rarely, do we have the exact same memory of an event that someone else, also there, would. My sister, for instance, wrote my editor that my account was true, even though she had told me after reading it that she had a very different experience of herself from the one I wrote. She understood, though, that memoir isn’t autobiography – it’s a mining of personal truths. It’s turning memories into art.

Let’s hope these requests for evidence will pass. Even more, let’s hope writers will stop trying to pass off complete fabrication as nonfiction and ruining it for the rest of us.

Keep reading – as we get closer to 2008 I promise to add updates…