The Only Girl in the Car
A Memoir
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
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Freelance journalist Dobie grew up in a small Connecticut town in the 1960s, the oldest girl in a Catholic family of eight. Her memoir opens when she's 14, sitting on her front lawn, all dolled up in her "candy-striped halter top, bell-bottom jeans, and platform shoes," waiting to get picked up by some guy any guy and lose her virginity. She doesn't know much about boys or men, but she's drawn to the bad ones, those who leer, eyeing her sexual possibilities. Before long, she's had sex with a few and acquired a steady boyfriend. While the sex isn't exactly arousing, she gets something she needs more: a crowd, a scene. Kathy has her Jimmy and a backseat full of Jimmy-wannabes, and they're cruising the neighborhood, drinking and smoking dope. Being "the only girl in the car" is a kick, until the night it turns into a gang rape and Kathy's whole world turns on her. She's ostracized so badly, she can't confide in her closest girlfriends, much less her family. Slowly she recovers by "remaking" herself as a loner, as a writer. Like many coming-of-age stories, Dobie's is painful, in large part because of the cultural cusp her generation of women had to navigate. Sexual liberation was celebrated even the youth center director talked with the teens while she dallied in bed with her boyfriend but girls with reputations were doomed. Although Dobie doesn't expose a new world, her text is engaging.
