Girl Trouble

To all the girls she's liked before, a memoirist offers a series of interconnected essays.Though she has characterized herself as "boy crazy" and previously documented that label in Loose Girl (2008), Cohen shifts her focus to her relationships with other girls--the ones who rejected her as a friend, the ones she rejected, the ones whom she saw as competition or yardsticks by which her own failings would never measure up. Some were witnesses and some were judges whose verdicts on her as unworthy have continued to reverberate through her adulthood and motherhood. A psychotherapist would focus on her parents' bitter divorce as the key to her alienation and lack of self-worth. "In most of my friendships, I'd been fun and happy and unafraid," she writes of a pivotal day when she felt ostracized. "But that day something shifted. For the first time I saw myself in the world, with others around me. My parents divorcing. My mother's grief. My own sense of newness and change, of the world spinning out of control." One of the ways this book offers healing is through Cohen's collaboration with the illustrator, her older sister Tyler. During "an ugly divorce, fraught with affairs and devastation and anger," their mother chose the older sister as her ally and confidante, leaving a breach between the two sisters that they wouldn't repair until adulthood. Her sister was her first true female friend and the first betrayal (of many). While recognizing that "memory is a slippery eel," Cohen surveys the dozens of relationships with women she has enjoyed and endured, showing how friendship changes with different stages and how she has as well. "I miss all of my ex-friends," she writes toward the conclusion. "They are stamped onto my heart like old romances, lost loves. They are parts of me in ways no one warned me they would be." A brief, canny book that will make any girl who feels alone feel less alone. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016
Cohen, who wrote about women's and teenage girls' difficult relationships (especially her own) with men and sex in Loose Girl (2008) and Dirty Little Secrets (2011) here rips open her experiences in female friendships. Her older sister, Tyler, provided the author's entree into girl trouble and is both the first friend profiled and the creator of the cartoons that accompany these one-to-two page vignettes, each named for the girl it's about. In a deeply confessional tone, psychotherapist Cohen dissects the unkindnesses she dealt and received as an unsure, unsupported, and self-conscious young girl who was yearning for assurance and clueless as to how to find it. She delves into some adult friendships, too: those tested by her grief over her son's autism diagnosis, those that ended bitterly, those she still misses, and one she doesn't. In this brief, eye-catching format, there are moments when readers will see themselves and their own past parade of Jennifers, Terris, and Staceys and stop to ponder the inevitable, outsize pains of adolescence and the confounding unreality of memory.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)