My Most Recent Addition to my Wishlist

Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen. Of it, Publisher's Weekly writes:

From Publishers Weekly
Despite the rather prurient title, Cohen's memoir is a deeply poignant, desperately sad account of a confused, directionless adolescent girl's free fall into self-abnegation. Growing up affluent in New Jersey in the 1980s and smarting from the recent breakup of her parents, 11-year-old Cohen begins to recognize the power her nubile body has over men. Being wanted becomes her greatest hope; once she and her older sister, Tyler, begin living with her father when her mother decides to attend med school in the Philippines, she latches onto other girls with whom she treks into New York City to bar hop at places like Dorian's Red Hand and pick up older, eager boys. Stunningly, the father is not alarmed by her early-morning absences, but seems to encourage her popularity, buying her clothes and treating her as a grownup. Gradually, hooking up with boys becomes a need, a way to bolster her faltering sense of self-worth. A litany of dreary sex acts follows with young men she doesn't particularly like and who don't like her, regardless of STD scares and a college rape. The painter mother of one of her boyfriends does initiate her into more intellectual pursuits, awakening a redemptive desire to become a writer. Cohen's memoir of a lost childhood is commendably honest and frequently excruciating to read.

The reviews are so-so, though. Jesse Crispin compares it to Reefer Madness, as a kind of failed morality tale, but also pulls one commonly heard gem from the book, and that's that girls can hurt girls in ways that boys will never know or understand.

Losing your virginity can be traumatic. You think it’s all waves crashing on the beach and fireworks, and instead maybe it lasts 20 seconds and kind of hurts. But the real message from Easy isn’t that you should save your virginity until you’re older and in love, it’s that girls are murder. It was not the boys who judged Jessica for putting out, but her new queen bee friends. When it gets around that Jessica went into the back room at a party with a boy she wasn’t dating, the girls turn on her.