In the future if I ever have children, they will, I assume, ask me about my days in New York, expecting to hear about debauched nights in which I bartered articles of clothing for a fifth of vodka from a homeless woman in the East Village or snorted lines of attention-deficit meds off a toilet seat in Penn Station. A) That's not how I roll, and B) Mommy was too poor to do anything but patronize the library and when she exhausted her book queue, took to sitting in Barnes and Noble and reading the latest releases.
Brag about THAT, kids. Your mom was, nay, is that cool.
My latest book find (not my find, per se, it's been written about here, here, and here) is Carlene Bauer's "Not That Kind of Girl," and boy howdy (YES, I just said boy howdy), if there were a book more tailored to my past year in New York, please, do share.
Bauer is the quintessential good girl from the looks of it. Raised in a conservative church where the threat of God's apocalyptic wrath loomed everywhere, she aims to hold onto her faith, figure out what being a 20-something person of religious belief means in New York City, and build her career as an established writer in the city. Bauer is influenced as much by Flannery O'Connor as she is by the Bible, Kierkegaard as the teachings of her various churches.
Cue the clacking of my dentures and a shaky hand wielding my cane threateningly at you, but in a time and city where comparable values- evangelically based or not- are a collective anomaly, this book was an incredibly refreshing take and thorough account of one woman's look at reassessing her beliefs and value system. She eventually spurns her cultural and evangelical touchpoints, but Bauer leaves the end on a nebulous but suggestive note. I am not giving the end of this memoir away to suggest that she knows what she has to do.
But above all, regardless of faith, she and I both have reconciled what we are, using one of my first literary inspirations: we're just both Maryannes, when we're expected to be Staceys. And I am Okay with that. Sorry, kiddos, no stories of sleeping around here, but Mommy did get pretty CA-RAZY on some Benadryl once or twice.
