Disturbing, compelling, the shocking coming-of-age memoir of the girl labelled as neighbourhood slut - from Catholic childhood, and wilful promiscuity at fourteen, to a gang rape, indelible social stigma, and how she finally got out from under . . .
"Cheesecake, jailbait, sex kitten" - the very words seemed to "open doors" to a powerful, sexy new self. But from the moment she decides to lose her virginity and reels in her prey, a "full-grown man", 14-year-old Kathy is headed for trouble.
One cold, raw March night some months later, in a car with four boys she thought were friends, she finds it. This is her story, told with frightening detachment, honesty and lack of self-pity. Full of raw emotion, humour, horror, it simply tells it how it was - as the oldest of six children in a liberal enough close-knit Catholic family, with rebellious brothers, a young exhausted mother, and a glamorous father whom she idolised.
In the spring of her fourteenth year suddenly "the earth blossomed with men and boys - they were everywhere" and "a halter top went straight to the point; it started its own conversations. Wearing one was as good as having a personality." But girls who breaks rules in small towns like the one she lived in are expected to pay a high price for their transgressions - and she did.
That fateful year culminated in a gang rape. How she stepped out of that car, forever altered, to be sure, but not forever damaged, how she learned to fight back, even to wear her stigma with a perverse pride, is the other part of the story she tells.
Always aware that her ambitions were bigger and more complicated than those of the suburbs where she grew up, Kathy was determined to come through, and the reader, drawn deep into her story, has a stake in the outcome.
