[.ca] The Only Girl in the Car (ISBN 0385318839)

Survival:
An amazing book. True it is difficult to read at times because of graphic situations, but an important book to read. It has the same ability to move you as "LUCKY", "NIGHTMARES ECHO" and "MY FRACTURED LIFE." Books like this show us the beauty in survival and inspire us to conquer our own inconsequencial demons.

The only girl that feels that way?:
What a very honest book! Congratulations to Kathy Dobie for presenting such a well documented account of being a teenage girl in a small town. I found it easy to be drawn into this girls life and the feelings and experiences she went through. Although I initially thought the book was going to be a much more harrowing, dramatic tale, I still enjoyed it immensly and has lead me to think about how I, too felt at that age. A great achievement from an unknown. Let's hear more from her!

Is rape a defining experience?:
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.

Disappointing:
When I first saw this book I thought it sounded very interesting, but then I was proved wrong. The book didn't have much to do with the title itself. The first half was describing every aspect of her home, friends hair color, etc. I found it boring. The middle got slightly more interesting. Then it was like she wrapped the entire book up in the last chapter. She went from child throughout the book to BOOM the rest of her life history in the last chapter. I also felt that she didn't explain very well what she learned through the experience. The book was jerky reading and as other readers said what was the real reason she was like this? She would one minute say what a happy family she had and then say how she hated them. Just made no sense to me. I have read alot better memoirs out there.

Deeply Moving:
This is a deeply moving memoir about life for a girl that gets in way over her head and finds that in doing so she is raped. The long journey to heal the wounds and all that the author learns from her life. I love memoirs, anything that is "truth telling and honest". This book is just that. It also speaks of a different form of abuse in this book, self abuse...as well as rape and what it is like to have been there. Like several other books I have read, Memoirs of real life courageous events such as Nightmares Echo, Running With Scissors and Lucky: A Memoir...this book ranks as tops with the others I have mentioned. I highly recommend.