Rating: 
Summary: A happy family
Review: I can't quite figure out what happened to Kathy. Her family seemed to really care about her. No absentee father, abusive mother...so why the rush to become sexual at such an early age. What was missing? As a grown woman who also overcame the stigma of being labeled slut and all the other terribly hurtful words teenaged boys and girls sling I can look back and see how I was craving love and companionship. Kath....what motivated you to try to grow up so fast? An answer would be great...anyone?
Rating: 
Summary: Such amazing talent
Review: I have read so many memoirs in the past year. Never have I been so moved with Kathy Dobie's "The Only Girl in The Car." It is beautifully written, exquisite prose, and a deep look into a woman's psyche. It is also a book that contained humor, often bold, and at times, heart-wrenching. It spoke the truth of a tortured soul. I hope that through her story, Ms. Dobie at last found peace. Strongly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Exquisite
Review: I was deeply moved by this book. I found the language poetic; the prose stunning. And, most importantly, I think, the author made me *feel* in a visceral way, what the protagonist was feeling. I was touched by the friendships - true friendships, that came from places that would (in the eyes of a society that sees things in black and white) seem implausable - yet there they were - glorious, for all of us to see. And I felt hurt for the utter betrayal suffered by a 15 year old girl. Naivete should never (but often does) lead to harm...and I felt for the "scrappy" 15 year old protagonist as she tried to find some kind of way to masculine affection. I think that Ms. Dobie has written an important book; I know many 15 year old girls who will feel empowered by her words; and I know many 51 year old women who will read her words and have them resonate inside them. But this isn't a woman's book; boys and men and intricately intertwined, and I pray that the title deosn't turn them off, for I know men who will read this book and see their daughters, their sisters - and themselves. Ms. Dobie has written truthfully; and at the same time leaves us with the message that the world is a big, bad and beautiful place. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A decent story - but not very impressed
Review: I was looking forward to reading this book after reading an article by the author in Glamour Magazine. However, the book barely kept me interested enough to keep reading. Dobie seems somewhat detached from her own story. "Telling rather than showing" to put in "writer's terms." I didn't really get a good feel of what anything actually FELT like to her. I also feel there is something she is not telling us. In my experience, girls who are that promiscuous at such a young age usually have extreme issues. Yes, attention, acceptance, rebellion, etc. are all "issues" and most teenage girls have them. However, not all teenage girls turn to such extreme promiscuity as this author. The "extreme desire for attention, acceptance, etc" is (in my limited experience) usually the result from something in the homelife. Either an EXTREMELY dysfunctional family - which I would not say her home life was all that dysfunctional - or some type of abuse - usually sexual abuse, but not always. Dobie gives little hint as to what led her to begin this path other than she "thought it was cool and empowering," and was "tired of being good." I think all women have felt that way at some point, but we all don't chose her path. Also, while what happened to her was awful and the ultimate betrayal of trust, I would NOT call it rape. When you say - even if it's a whispered - "okay" and hold your boyfriend's hand while you let three other guys **** you - it is not rape. Sure, the guys were angry at her and wanted to degrade her, but they did not rape her. She did not say no, she did not fight, she did not try to leave. I am willing to bet the guys would have taken her home had she gotten upset and demanded to leave. But, we, and she, will never know. After that, she seemed to wake up and was all of a sudden surprised at her reputation. Well, what did she expect? She had been working on it, seemed to proud of it, for years. Now all of a sudden it bothers her? The ending was also a disappointment. I don't feel she truly reflects or even grows from this experience - or if she does she doesn't share it with the reader. How has it REALLY affected her? Her current life? Her current relationships? Not that it needs to be a morality play, but what advice does she have for a young girl today? This book left me disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Is rape a defining experience?
Review: I work with college age women (who aren't so far removed from the fragile 14 year-old described in this memoir) and I watch them struggle not only with their own sexuality and sexual "freedom", but also with levels of intimacy, anger, and hostility levied at them by college age men. As I read Dobie's memoir, I was fascinated to note that it wasn't a lurid or titilating tale of adolescent rape (in fact, that word is never used in the book). Instead, it was an attempt by a self-possessed young women to *keep* a traumatic experience from being the defining moment in her life. Clearly, something terrible happened that night. . . but other bad things happen, too. (She points out that debilitating spinal braces are no bed bed of roses, either.) Furthermore, Dobie used bad judgement . . . and paid a price that was far too punative for a lapse in adolescent clear thinking. However, her life didn't stop with the incident, and neither did her spirit. Dobie is forced to live with the consequences of events that night, and come to learn how to develop other parts of her being. Despite the fact that this is about a rather unpleasant subject, it was a refreshing change from books like *The Prince of Tides* (and hundreds of others) where horrible, faceless, assailants appear mysteriously out of the woods, and the victims are branded for life.
Rating:
Summary: The Only Book on my List
Review: If I had a list of "memoirs that are as fascinating and well-written as the best fiction" Kathy Dobie's "The Only Girl in the Car" would be the only book on my list. It begins as a conventional coming-of-age memoir (although one with stunningly beautiful prose) and then entices and entraps the reader into a mesmerizing narrative with a dramatic shape reminiscent of the best-structured novels. The book's sexuality is at once graphic and heartbreaking, a rare combination. Its depiction of high school society, especially the casual cruelty, is disturbingly accurate. It is a must for anyone, male or female, who has survived an American high school, and for anyone interested in a writer who creates a new genre of memoir with grace, beauty and frankness.
Rating:
Summary: memoirist faces her degradation with stoic, courageous honor
Review: It took Kathy Dobie twenty years of adult living before she could come to grips with what occurred to her one frigid evening, victimized not only by sexual assault, but by her own misguided, destructive life decisions. In order to honor that defining moment, she determined to "bear witness by writing about it." Her wrenching, illuminating memoir, "The Only Girl in the Car" not only honors memory, but transforms it into a profound contemplation of personality and identity. Written with both clear-headed objectivity and profound compassion, this work will stand both as a warning and as a testimony to hope. Dobie's ability to understand the conflicted surges of her teen-aged sexuality permits a rare glimpse into adolescent rebellion, family stress and personal reconciliation. The author comes of age in a cohesive 1970s suburban New Haven family, complete with a martyred Catholic sense of suffering, duty and selfless obligtion. As adolescence approaches, Dobie's allegiance changes from mother to father. The "opposing narratives" of her parents' lives provide alternate paths. Her mother, raised as a single child of a divorced mother, speaks of the past with a "keening complaint" and focuses on the "interior" pains of "hurt feelings and unhapiness." Her intensely focused father depicts "life as filled with tests, danger...and adventure." Initially, Dobie's "dreaminess and forgetfulness" clash with her father's "Germanic...distaste for both disorder and vulnerability," but the author ultimately embraces her father's appetite for the "world's richness" and a "large life filled with drama." Paradoxically, Dobie is fascinated by passivity and gradually learns to link it with sexuality. Both "unpredictable and sensual," passivity charges her with sexual energy, so intense that she "swooned with pleasure." After her older brother runs away from home, Dobie discovers a "bewildering colness" overtaking her sensibilities, and she realizes that her days as a "witness, a handmaiden with the coffeepot" were about to end. If her brother defined himself by physical removal, Dobie determines that sexuality will be her means of self-liberation. At fourteen, the author's savors her realization that not only does her body have an impact on men, but their notice of her body inexplicably thrills her. Gradually, Dobie engages in mindless, unfulfilling intercourse -- an accepted rite of passage for young men but a terminally stigmatizing experience for young women. Her sexual experiences result in numbness, not freedom; confusion, not certainty. Her acts of rebellion estrange her from her family, friends and self. Her sexual partners -- boyfriends is far too intimate a designation -- satisfy their needs on and through her, but never "with" her. These young men have regular girlfriends with whom they would never act on their sexual impulses. In the Madonna-whore dichotomy, there is no question which role Dobie assumes. One young man even whispers "chinga" [Spanish for whore] into her ear during the sexual act. In a surreal transposition of secret keeping, the people who are close to her are frozen out of Katie's new sexual identity and the nameless blue-collar young men and women of her town excoriate her, brutally branding her as promiscuous trash. Dazed and slowly comprehending that her "life will never be the same," Dobie watches the evaporation of her former identity, a sense that a younger self "was mine no longer." After the evening of her ultimate degradation, she asks rhetorially, "What kind of girl would let four boys do what those boys had done to me?" Yet, she refuses to accept her victimization (painfully and powerfully recreated in the memoir), determined grimly to "face the music." Her reckoning and redemption begins in the act of truly befriending her sister Cindy, who is forced to wear a back brace to correct a spinal defect. Caring for Cindy teaches Dobie that not only does life go on, but that the world could become beautiful through acts of kindness, consideration and love. To the author's delight, life's unspoken beauty "would always be there, waiting." As Kathy Dobie seeks to authenticate her experiences, to comprehend their significance, she must confront the perpetrators. Their indiffernce and menace convince her of the singularity of that night in the car and of her need to be "even more protective" of her memory, "more distrustful of other people's interpretations" of the assault. These memories, "guarded for years" must be stored away, only to be opened for self-evaluation years later. "The Only Girl in the Car" is the product of decades of sequestered memory and deliberate interpretation. Memoirist Fern Schumer Chapman has written that identity is formed by self, family, place and past. Katie Dobie has used that formula and selected one defining moment to be the prism through which those four variables intersect. Her identity, formed around frequent uncomprehending sexual intercourse as an early adolescent, rotates around the painful understanding that angry, sexually-frustrated young men radiate hatred towards young women who explore sex. Ruefully, she concludes that these boys, soon to become men, will receive as much "pleasure to hurt a girl...as...to make love to her." Their cost is greater than hers. She will overcome; they will not.
Rating:
Summary: Budding sexuality and the loneliness of wanting
Review: Kathy Dobie grew up in a large Catholic Family in a small town outside New Haven. While her family was close, as often happens, her teenage years brought feelings of alienation and isolation even among the inescapable brothers and sisters and committed parents. And all was not perfect for her. Kathy adored her mother, who often felt smothered by all of Kathy's attention and her childlike neediness. Ultimately Kathy needed more than her family, and her mother, could give. Discovering the power of her budding pubescent sexuality was a real high for Kathy. She enjoyed flirting sexually with strangers, feeling their unmasked desire and shock at her youthful forwardness. On the highways of a cross country journey, tucked away in the back of the family trailer, Kathy would flash sexually provocative hand written signs to passing motorists and truckers. She was understanding the potency of her young sexuality. Back at home, never realizing the dangerous situations that she often placed herself in, Kathy had sex frequently with strangers and aquaintances. It seems clear that she was looking for power and attention. She loved that boys and men wanted and desired her. She believed that because she let these boys have sex with her, she had power over them. It took awhile, and some very painful and horrible events, for the truth to dawn on her. She also came to realize that in searching for a connection, she had cut herself off from her own family and most of her schoolmates. This book is beautifully written but is most stunning for its brutal honesty. She really lays herself bare. As we grow up and make mistakes (some of which still make me cringe) we often don't want to look back on those awkward times when we didn't know which end was up. She doesn't hold anything back - it is all revealed. Every blemish and every foolish choice. I applaud Kathy Dobie her trust in us, the readers, to understand and listen to her story without judgment.
Rating:
Summary: What would your narrative say?
Review: Kathy Dobie is a powerful yet simple writer. The prologue immediately pulls you in and touches each of your senses as well as your memory and empathy as the story develops.
It is fascinating to watch the old and young Kathy make the connections about how the past and present combine to who you are. If there is any one lack in this memoir is that once the "definitive moment" actually takes place I don't feel I completely understand how the protagonist really grew past it. We know what she does at 17 and where she is now but I found myself wanting to know what the 20 years in between were like. Now granted, that would have been a really long memoir!
This is a very well written memoir and I love the quote, "What narrative has this person fashioned to help him or her survive?" Kathy Dobie is speaking of those that she now writes about but it is about herself and all of us. We all create a story about ourselves but it is up to each of us to decide how true it really is.
This ia great read.
Rating:
Summary: Memoir at its Poignant and Lucid Best
Review: Kathy Dobie takes a tale of a messy and traumatic sexual coming of age and through the alchemy of lyric imagination achieves art with a capital "A." Much American memoir of recent years has tended towards the self-pitying, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing... ego overwhelming form. Not only does Dobie avoid this trap, she rises to dizzying literary heights. This is a political book without rhetoric, a psychological journey without therapeutic cliche, a journal of sexuality that isn't tawdry, an American memoir that embraces the reader as tenderly as Dobie has her own shattering past.
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