Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity follows Kerry Cohen's harrowing trajectory from young, insecure, and confused girl to healthy, assured, and balanced adult. And what a journey it is. This memoir will leave you breathless due to the shear candor of Kerry’s tale. Kerry bares her soul wide open and it isn’t always pretty. Of course, that’s what makes Loose girl so compelling.
Kerry spent her youth looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. She tried to quell her intense need and anxiety by immersing herself in shallow, physical relationships with boys. It took many years of heartbreak, broken relationships (familial, platonic and romantic), physical maladies, and soul searching before Kerry found her way out of this dark abyss. She takes her readers along every leg of this intense journey with grace, candor and perceptive insight into her own past feelings and actions.
Kerry lets the reader take a good hard look at all the pain, insecurity and intense desire for acceptance experienced by teenage girls and shows how very wrong things can go for a young girl who doesn’t have guidance, boundary limits and parental support. This memoir is as much of a cautionary tale for parents as it is anything else.
Loose Girl works as both a captivating story and as an important addition to the zeitgeist of contemporary non-fiction due to the insight it provides into the mind and motivations of a certain sub-set of teenage girls.
Loose Girl is important and relevant in much the same way that Koren Zailckas’s ground-breaking memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood was – namely it can make us more tolerant, understanding and empathetic people because it is hard to be judgmental about controversial behavior once the motivation behind it is understood. Also, readers of these memoirs with similar circumstances might be able to gain enough introspection so as not to repeat the same mistakes- maybe, because as we learn by reading these memoirs, sometimes one just needs to take the journey and hope to come out okay once on the other side.
Kerry spent her youth looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. She tried to quell her intense need and anxiety by immersing herself in shallow, physical relationships with boys. It took many years of heartbreak, broken relationships (familial, platonic and romantic), physical maladies, and soul searching before Kerry found her way out of this dark abyss. She takes her readers along every leg of this intense journey with grace, candor and perceptive insight into her own past feelings and actions.
Kerry lets the reader take a good hard look at all the pain, insecurity and intense desire for acceptance experienced by teenage girls and shows how very wrong things can go for a young girl who doesn’t have guidance, boundary limits and parental support. This memoir is as much of a cautionary tale for parents as it is anything else.
Loose Girl works as both a captivating story and as an important addition to the zeitgeist of contemporary non-fiction due to the insight it provides into the mind and motivations of a certain sub-set of teenage girls.
Loose Girl is important and relevant in much the same way that Koren Zailckas’s ground-breaking memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood was – namely it can make us more tolerant, understanding and empathetic people because it is hard to be judgmental about controversial behavior once the motivation behind it is understood. Also, readers of these memoirs with similar circumstances might be able to gain enough introspection so as not to repeat the same mistakes- maybe, because as we learn by reading these memoirs, sometimes one just needs to take the journey and hope to come out okay once on the other side.
1 comment:
Interesting read - I may have to check this one out!
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