Tell us about your memoir.
- About ten years ago I started to do what lots of women do at some point in their lives – I tried to count up the men with whom I’d had sexual experiences. As the list grew, and grew, I found myself running into lots of problems. I couldn’t remember names. I couldn’t remember circumstances. Boys melded into each other. It was very disturbing, but that disturbance became the seed for this book.
Loose Girl is a memoir about my descent into promiscuity and how I gradually found my way toward real intimacy. It is also a story of addiction – not to sex – but to male attention, how I came to believe boys and men could fill my emptiness, and how I tried to control them by handing over my body. Through a combination of growing sick of my own pain, relationships, friendship, and therapy, I finally learned to allow longer, more enduring relationships to grow. I learned to quiet the desperation and allow myself to be loved.
During the initial phase of writing the book I also grew aware of how common my experiences were. Most every woman I mentioned the project to said, “That’s about my life .” Yet at the same time no one seemed to be talking about it. Here we all were, feeling so alone, feeling so ashamed, and yet we were really all there together. Someone needed to write a book like mine. When I became a therapist and sat with girl after girl struggling with the same issues, all these years later, I knew just how needed. Adolescent promiscuity is epidemic, but no one talks about why. Just like when I was young, girls are blamed for their behavior. That old dichotomy of the slut and virgin is still alive and well, and there doesn’t seem to be lots of discussion beyond that. This silence is the essence of my story: the silence surrounding girls’ sexuality, the silence among girls, between boys and girls, and the silence inside.
- Recalling the material in your book must have been difficult. How do you feel now, looking back at your younger self.
- Oh, man. Regretful. Sad. I wished a lot during the writing that I could go into the pages and save myself. I carried the fantasy that I simply wasn’t lovable, and most everything I did grew from that lie. Sometimes I look back on those times and think how much was wasted. Like other addictions, my fixation on boys kept me from doing lots of things that might have truly filled me. I gave up trips to other countries, becoming friends with interesting people, and writing more, to name a few. I gave up the opportunity to know myself as a whole person, to find out who I might have been had I not spent so much of my time thinking about what boys were thinking of me. I might have been someone worth thinking of more.
But I also feel hopeful. I mean, I’m still that girl in the book. I still have some of those struggles. Yet look how far I’ve come.
- You are painfully honest in talking about your encounters with boys and men. Is there any one memory that stands out for you?
- The one with “Justin’s” friend in the laundry room still stings. It was so representative of my issues: I went off with this guy I didn’t even know because I wanted his friend to feel jealous, which is a really, really bad reason to have sex with someone. I didn’t want to have sex with him but I did anyway because he moved so quickly and I felt like this was just what I did – I had sex, no questions asked. The sex was horrible, of course, and we were on the dirty floor of a laundry room. In the end, I can’t even remember the guy’s name. It was a real low point for me.
- How has your life changed by writing your story?
- I don’t like to think of writing a book as an act of therapy – I believe it degrades the art of the craft. Still, I can’t deny that there was something therapeutic about the end result. It’s so helpful to see my life in narrative form, to see all those difficult, seemingly random pieces threaded together into a meaningful whole. It makes the hard things I experienced consequential, even beautiful. I guess in this way there is some healing.
- Has your husband read your memoir? What did he think of it?
- My husband hasn’t read the memoir yet, but not for reasons you might think. He’s just not overly interested in this type of book. He told me if I wrote a book about post-war Germany or the lives of farm workers during the Depression – now that’s a book which he’d be first in line to read. He promised he’d read it when it was in bookstores though. He knows what the book is about, and he’s already been privy to lots of the stories. I did ask him how he felt about the whole idea of the book, and he’s solely supportive. He’s not a jealous kind of guy, and he’s reasonable – he knows it’s in my past.
- What advice would you offer girls facing similar struggles today?
- The most important thing is communication. I’m not going to be so bold as to say I know what causes girls’ promiscuity, but I do know that had I found just one adult to listen – really listen – to my feelings and concerns, I may not have gone so quickly down the path I did. The other thing is education about being a girl in our culture. If you take some time to look around, it won’t be long before you recognize how much and how consistently girls are given limitations. Boys are limited, too, but not in the same ways and not nearly as much. You can tell by the way boys walk, the way they yell to girls from their cars, the way they sit, their legs open, bodies relaxed. In general girls are not afforded these same freedoms, but most every girl wants it. Hoping to get it, many of them attach themselves to boys, and then take it way too far, like I did. They grow dependent on boys liking them, and they lose sight of themselves. Getting a boy to notice you is easy – it’s the easiest thing in the world for a girl – but it’s also selling yourself short. If, rather than stringing themselves along with boys, girls started demanding more freedoms, like the freedom to be who they wanted to be, to flaunt their intelligence, their creativity, what would happen? I fully believe girls how the power to change the cultural restrictions put on them, but as long as they keep latching onto boys, nothing will change.
- What do you hope your readers will take away from Loose Girl?
- Mostly connection. So many girls and women feel alone with feelings similar to the ones I wrote about in Loose Girl. I want them to feel seen. I also hope readers will gain a deeper understanding of female promiscuity, that more often than not it’s not a girl simply “asking for it” or, another belief growing out there these days, being empowered. It’s a girl who is likely trying to fill her emptiness with what feels like an easy, albeit misguided, way to do so. It’s a girl who is trying, and failing, again and again to be loved. It’s a girl who doesn’t love herself.
- What’s next for you?
- I haven’t been doing psychotherapy since my second child was born, and I’m not sure I’ll go
back to it. I’d like instead to do more teaching, particularly creative writing. I’ve also got another project in the percolation stage about parenting my older son who is on the autistic spectrum. That’s where I plan to spend the bulk of my energy next.