MADreads

Loose? Or just lost?

August 21st, 2008 Molly - Central

Mamma Mia! the popular stage musical and now feature film starring Meryl Streep celebrates feminism and sexual liberation in such a playful, entertaining way that many moviegoers might not even think much about it. Meryl’s character cavorts with her middle-aged pals and frets over her daughter finding out that she slept with three different men the summer that her daughter was conceived. Everyone is dancing, everyone ends up happy, no harm done.

In Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, Kerry Cohen truthfully admits that she slept with dozens more than that number during her teens and early 20s.  She is not dancing, it doesn’t make her happy and the harm is irreparable.  Craving the attention and security that was lost following the divorce of her parents when she was eleven, she revels in the attention that she receives from both boys and men.  At an age when I was still playing with Barbie dolls, Kerry and her friends are sneaking into New York City from their wealthy New Jersey suburb to meet up with boys.  By the time she is 14, she is hanging out at NYC clubs and hooking up with complete strangers.  Because her crowd is made up of prep school boys and girls, a false sense of security surrounds her.  Even after a girl that she recognizes is found strangled in Central Park (see the Preppie Murder) by a boy that she would have gladly gone home with, she doesn’t slow down. 

Kerry is taken advantage of again and again, by boys and trusted adult men while desperately trying to achieve intimacy and closeness.  Inappropriate and seriously lacking parenting in her life leads her to destructive behavior.  After her parents’ divorce, Kerry and her sister are basically left to their own devices.  No one knows where they are or what they are up to.  Her mother leaves for the Philippines to go to medical school and her father wants to be the cool dad.  Not only are cocaine and other drugs readily available in her dad’s dresser drawer, he smokes pot with Kerry and her friends.  Both mother and father stoke Kerry’s insecurities when it comes to relationships and much of what she describes is such a cry for help it is heartbreaking.

While STDs and pregnancy scares shake her, it takes therapy to really get her on the right track.  Decades later she is still trying to put her life back together and struggles daily to develop and maintain durable relationships.  This memoir should be required reading for teen girls and their mothers and would aptly fit into a Psych 101 syllabus.

Entry Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Nonfiction