But what makes The Big Hurt so singularly rich and harrowing - what sets it apart from the troves of young girls’ coming-of-age stories set in a culture that primes them for sexual predation and emotional abuse - is that it percolated while Schickel was ensconced in a tumultuous, marriage-ending affair. The problem with the original concept, Schickel notes, is that “the story wasn’t funny, and the more I rummaged through the memories I had put away three decades ago, the sadder it became.” Indeed, when you strip away Schickel’s cheeky, effervescent prose and charismatic self-deprecation, there is little to laugh at: compulsive shoplifting self-absorbed, sort-of-famous parents in the midst of a “spectacularly ugly zeitgeist divorce” and a series of bleak, often exploitative sexual relationships with older boys and men, beginning at age 13 - all leave Schickel with a defensive and affectedly blasé disregard for her own agency or well-being. ![]() Still sharp-tongued and darkly hilarious, it is also one of the more relentlessly honest, big-hearted reckonings with abuse to come out of the #MeToo era. Now, 13 years later, the book is here, and it’s proven itself to be something quite different. ![]() It would be a funny bad-girl story that would bring back all the richness of that weird time and place.” WHEN ERIKA SCHICKEL set out to write The Big Hurt in 2008, she had in mind a rollicking “pastiche of stories” about her glamorous adolescent delinquency as a child of 1970s Manhattan literati and her ill-fated tenure at a “progressive, bohemian boarding school” in the Berkshires: “olling around in the tall grass with boys, smoking dope out of apple pipes in the woods, ice-skating on quaaludes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |