Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

by Kerry Cohen

Hardcover, 2008

Status

Available

Genres

Publication

Hyperion (2008), Edition: 1st, 210 pages

Description

For everyone who was that girl. For everyone who knew that girl. For everyone who wondered who that girl was. Kerry Cohen is eleven years old when she recognizes the power of her body in the leer of a grown man. Her parents are recently divorced and it doesn't take long before their lassitude and Kerry's desire to stand out--to be memorable in some way--combine to lead her down a path she knows she shouldn't take. Kerry wanted attention. She wanted love. But not really understanding what love was, not really knowing how to get it, she reached for sex instead. Loose Girl is Kerry Cohen's captivating memoir about her descent into promiscuity and how she gradually found her way toward real intimacy. The story of addiction--not just to sex, but to male attention--Loose Girl is also the story of a young girl who came to believe that boys and men could give her life meaning. It didn't matter who he was. It was their movement that mattered, their being together. And for a while, that was enough. From the early rush of exploration to the day she learned to quiet the desperation and allow herself to love and be loved, Kerry's story is never less than riveting. In rich and immediate detail, Loose Girl re-creates what it feels like to be in that desperate moment, when a girl tries to control a boy by handing over her body, when the touch of that boy seems to offer proof of something, but ultimately delivers little more than emptiness. Kerry Cohen's journey from that hopeless place to her current confident and fulfilled existence is a cautionary tale and a revelation for girls young and old. The unforgettable memoir of one young woman who desperately wanted to matter, Loose Girl will speak to countless others with its compassion, understanding, and love.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member amycat
I received this in the mail around noon yesterday and finished it by 4:30 pm--it's a VERY quick read. The story is straightforward with very little ambiguity. As I read, I found myself most frustrated with Kerry's parents: a father who was more concerned with trying to impress her friends by
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 smoking dope with them and a mother who was so self centered that she could never see how her daughters were hurting. Overall, the story was compelling (obviously--I couldn't put it down!), but in the end, I found it to be pretty shallow. Kerry makes lots of bad choices in the name of finding "love" and goes into lots of detail in depicting her journey. However, the actual recovery from her addiction where she learns her life lesson--sex and love are not necessarily the same--is glossed over and feels kind of tacked on. I expected more from her self discovery and walked away from the book feeling kind of disappointed. In an odd cosmic sense, this must be what she felt like after having sex with all those men.
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LibraryThing member superfastreader
The most striking thing about Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl is the inevitability of her misbehavior. Cohen’s parents divorced when she was a preteen, and neither one seems able to practice any kind of responsible or involved parenting. Her dad is the kind of guy who asks for a toke when he catches
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 his daughter and her friends getting high, and her mother is a gynecologist who prescribes abortion pills for Cohen without even an office visit. Both parents exhibit some very creepy boundary-crossing behavior. The only surprise here is that worse didn’t happen to Cohen.

As the mother of a daughter who reads a lot of stuff like this, I’m well aware of the pitfalls facing girls and young women navigating today’s world. I really hope that Superfast Husband and I can provide the kind of home where she will feel safe and secure to explore her independence–take risks without engaging in self-destructive behavior.

Cohen’s life was a misery, until she (hopefully) managed to break her pattern. Loose Girl is a sad, sobering read that sheds a lot of light on the inner pain of such a free spirit.
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LibraryThing member mommymouse
Disturbing is the first word that comes to mind. This book gets under your skin quickly. Some of her thoughts and feelings were very simular to my own youth, and it was very hard reliving some of those feelings. The ending felt rushed, as if she had more to say, but no time to say it. Overall, a
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 worthwhile read.
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LibraryThing member homegirl
Since I love books about coming of age, this was right up my alley. However, while reading it I kept looking at the cover because I could not believe this was a memoir. It really shocked me how reckless she was with her sexuality. I did however enjoy the book, though I felt the first half was too
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 rushed and details overall were vague. I would have loved to read more about her relationship with her parents and her sister Tyler.
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LibraryThing member TheScrappyCat
Kerry Cohen touched a nerve for me with her 'Memoir of Promiscuity'. I, too, was one of 'those' girls, the ones the boys snickered about, the ones shunned by the 'good' girls. I understood what she meant when she said that what she really wanted and hoped for, with every encounter, was love. I get
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 it, Kerry, and I just wanted to say thank you for putting these thoughts into words. This book was much-needed, and I only wish more people understood what so many of us dealt with growing up. Solidly recommended.
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LibraryThing member metermaid1
This was a very quick read and I was very engaged in the story. However, I think Kerry spends the majority of the book telling the story of what she did, and not as much time was spent on how she healed. In the end I am not sure she even learned her lesson and that makes the book seem like a bit of
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 a waste of time to me.
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LibraryThing member dysmonia
On the one hand, there's the same old modern tale: pretty white girl with problems turns to booze/other drugs/sex/bulimia to try to gain some control over her emotionally shattered life. On the other, there's the fact Kerry Cohen has a beautiful voice as a writer and weaves an aching, visceral
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 memoir that is quite interesting to read. Another note: no Twelve Step Program. (spoiler)I noticed the anticlimactic ending, but it didn't bother me. In the interview in the back of the edition I checked out of the library, Cohen mentions some readers expressed a desire for a big "addiction moment" and traditional recovery. This just isn't her story, and I think it's more realistic for it -- AA, for instance, has a startlingly low success rate.(/spoiler)
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LibraryThing member contrary_wise
I found Loose Girl a frustrating read. Cohen claimed to offer more insights into her "addiction" to sex than boiler-plate pop psych, but she failed to offer up anything more than that. I was disappointed in her inability to examine her behavior in any kind of larger cultural context. A feminist
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 analysis would have helped turn the book away from her endless navel-gazing and self-blame, and helped Cohen to ask real questions about exactly why it was her sexual partners were so unavailable and unresponsive to her needs and desires. It's sad to read yet another book that presumes all young women's sexuality is rooted in low self-esteem rather than a more complex mix of emotions, including legitimate sexual desires. In the end, Loose Girl reinforces stereotypes of "bad" female sexuality as promiscuous and "good" sexuality as within monogamous marriage. I'm still looking for a more nuanced and insightful portrayal of women's sexuality.
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LibraryThing member SigmundFraud
A MUST READ. Not to be missed. compelling, frightening, heart wrenching, fast paced, horrifying, the sorrowful mysteries. The hollowness of her life makes me vomit. Sadly she can't give, but only take. In the last few pages there is redemption.
LibraryThing member psychomamma
I requested this book from the Early Reviewers program at Library Thing because I'm a psychotherapist. Women who use sex and love to feel worthy are abundant, and the residue of these experiences can be hard to work through. I thought this might be a good book to have in my library for
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 clients.

Well, I really liked the book, but I don't know that I would give it to clients. This is a fascinating look at promiscuity - what it's roots are and the internal damage it can do. I could barely put it down, which is unusual for me since I'm not a huge fan of non-fiction.

But, like other reviewers, I wanted more at the end. I wanted to hear her conclusions about what happened to her and how she makes sense of it now, especially since she's now a psychotherapist herself. I wanted to know what the journey was like between then and now. To give it to a client, I'd want some kind of a diary about how to get out of the pattern, not just a diary of the pattern.

Ahem...a sequel, maybe?

I also had difficulty with the present tense, first person style. Here's an example:

Once, Susan calls me to the window to see a fox in their backyard.

I'm sure this is grammatically fine, but she is saying "once" as in, in the past, and then the rest of the sentence is present tense...? This style tripped me up, and several times, like with this sentence, I found myself re-reading the sentence and saying "huh?" to myself. As I say, I'm sure it's defendable grammatically, but I just didn't like it much.
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LibraryThing member efoltz
Kerry's parents divorce when she is a teenager which starts her addiction to men. The memoir takes the reader to several dark sexual experiences and makes teenage drug use and sex seem common place. The memoir was a quick, easy read but it felt like the typical teenage sex story.
LibraryThing member benruth
_Loose Girl_ is Kerry Cohen's unflinching look at her adolescent history of promiscuity. It is the sort of material that, in a different author's hands, could have been made lewd, but her sensitivity to her subject and clarity of description means the reader does not have to identify with her
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 adolescent self particularly closely in order to come to some understanding of her circumstances. While the twists and turns of her story can be wearing, and the reader has the occasional urge to seize her and talk some sense into her and while one is left at the end wishing to know more about her life since the events she relates, it is a compelling enough book to keep the reader who has made an initial commitment to the book immersed until the very end.
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LibraryThing member Jadesbooks
This book was really good. It was written in a style that made you want to keep reading, and when it was over - I wanted more. This book is a memoir of a woman who had struggled with her feelings of needing to be wanted, loved and accepted. She takes you back to when she started feeling neglected,
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 just before her teen years, and on through to her adult life. She is not afraid to tell all of her most painful secrets, her inability to control how she acted with men, glimpses into her life that hinted at more uncomfortable situations that she was not able to understand completely, and how she finally was able to understand how to cope. I want to thank Kerry Cohen for writing about her life, so that other women know they are not alone in their desire to be loved, and that there is no shame in going to conseling and working every day to feel good about who you are and that you do not need someone to make you feel worthy.
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LibraryThing member Suso711
A very quick, engaging read - I read it in just a few hours. I appreciiated her candor in speaking about her emotions and what led her down the path to promiscuity. Although I've never been promiscuous, there was a lot I could relate to, surprisingly! I found the end to leave me feeling hollow,
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 though. On one page, she was hooking up with a guy, and on the next, she was getting married. The very tale end of her journey needed more fleshing out, more questions asked, and answered. It was a great book though!
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LibraryThing member manogirl
Maybe it was a mistake requesting this book through Early Reviewers. In fact, YES, it was a mistake. Because I got about 50 pages in and just had to stop. I guess I'm the wrong audience for this. I don't care if the author wants to sleep with lots of men, and I don't care why. I'm no prude, believe
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 you me, but I'm also just not interested in memoirs that involved the author being dragged through hell by themselves. Whether that be drugs, alcohol or sex that's the chosen hell.

I have no patience for this sort of memoir. I'm happy that someone came out the other side, but why do we have to come through with them? I'm continually shocked by the fact that these sordid memoirs are published year after year, but apparently other people besides me must really like this sort of thing. Maybe that brush with the forbidden is exciting? I don't know, I just find it maddening.

It might be a little rude, but oh well, there you have it. To me, this book wasn't worth reading. So I didn't.
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LibraryThing member Brianna_H
Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity follows Kerry Cohen's harrowing trajectory from young, insecure, and confused girl to healthy, assured, and balanced adult. And what a journey it is. This memoir will leave you breathless due to the shear candor of Kerry’s tale. Kerry bares her soul wide open
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 and it isn’t always pretty. Of course, that’s what makes Loose girl so compelling.

Kerry spent her youth looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. She tried to quell her intense need and anxiety by immersing herself in shallow, physical relationships with boys. It took many years of heartbreak, broken relationships (familial, platonic and romantic), physical maladies, and soul searching before Kerry found her way out of this dark abyss. She takes her readers along every leg of this intense journey with grace, candor and perceptive insight into her own past feelings and actions.

Kerry lets the reader take a good hard look at all the pain, insecurity and intense desire for acceptance experienced by teenage girls and shows how very wrong things can go for a young girl who doesn’t have guidance, boundary limits and parental support. This memoir is as much of a cautionary tale for parents as it is anything else.

Loose Girl works as both a captivating story and as an important addition to the zeitgeist of contemporary non-fiction due to the insight it provides into the mind and motivations of a certain sub-set of teenage girls.

Loose Girl is important and relevant in much the same way that Koren Zailckas’s ground-breaking memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood was – namely it can make us more tolerant, understanding and empathetic people because it is hard to be judgmental about controversial behavior once the motivation behind it is understood. Also, readers of these memoirs with similar circumstances might be able to gain enough introspection so as not to repeat the same mistakes- maybe, because as we learn by reading these memoirs, sometimes one just needs to take the journey and hope to come out okay once on the other side.
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LibraryThing member bobbieharv
I got an Early Review copy of this book, and so I can't help comparing it to "Moose, a Memoir of Fat Camp," by Stephanie Klein, which I also reviewed. I liked both of them a lot: honest, no-holds-barred writing; capturing what it felt like to be in the throes of addiction. I gave them both the same
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 rating, but for different reasons. "Moose" had a problem with the flow of the narrative - it jumped around episodically and could be confusing. But it was right there, in the narrator's head. "Loose Girl" is more removed - it's as though she's trying to portray what the (sex) addiction felt like and, at the same time, analyze it. It doesn't quite work - we understand what the addiction felt like, but aren't quite sure why and how she recovered (and, indeed, wonder whether she truly is recovered). At the end I felt worried about her (what seemed like sudden) marriage, like after reading Ladies Home Journal "Can This Marriage be Saved." The book was a strange combination of rather shallow psychological analysis and memoir, and we were never quite located in her current-moment head. I'm giving it a "4," however, because it was courageous, well-written, and compelling.
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LibraryThing member rosiedemario
I started the book this morning and finished this evening. I wouldn't say it's the best thing I've ever read, but it was enough to keep me entranced in the story. Cohen beautifully details her sexual exploits, she says early on she lost count after 25 partners. I read with shock and a little bit of
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 understanding. Cohen, first a writer and now a practicing psychoanalyst, is able to pinpoint what went wrong in her life to create this addiction in a very poignant way. The message of the book is not lasting, but there is a happy ending.
Cohen's book is not a book on how to love yourself. It's not even a book about learning to love yourself entirely. It is a book about learning to love the pieces that make the whole. I don't think Cohen would even say she loves herself entirely to this day, but she does a great job of showing her path to quasi-enlightenment.
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LibraryThing member gkleinman
Loose Girl is a well focused look at one woman's journey through insecurity, dysfunction and unhappiness. It reads a lot like many other 'addiction' books but since the 'addiction' it covers is sex, the highs and lows are a lot less extreme. Author Kerry Cohen does a good job of drawing the reader
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 in and
creating a very vivid and engaging world. Her writing is clear, flowing and polished. I found myself zipping through the book fully engaged with Cohen's journey. My biggest gripe is that the book has almost no third act. Cohen's story has a very distinct beginning, middle, but a very soft end. I felt there was more book in Cohen and she stopped short of where the story could have taken her. The writer's Bio indicates that Cohen is now married with children, but the book never really ventures into how her past has shaped her present or now how reflecting on all this has impacted her as she moves forward. Even with a less than full ending, I still did like Loose Girl, it's well written, engaging and worth reading especially for fans of the genre.
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LibraryThing member karenthecroccy
Compellingly readable and well written. Cohen writes in a language that makes the book speak to so many different people in so many different walks of life. Some people will see themselves in the ache of Cohen's need to fit in throughout high school. Some people will see themselves in her desire to
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 be loved throughout her entire life.

Many people will be able to see a bit of themselves in Kerry Cohen. This realization will cause you to devour this book.

The blurbs wish to compare this book with Smashed. It is as good as Smashed, sure. But I'd say it's 50x better.
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LibraryThing member bffs
After finishing this book, I realized there are really so few ways in which women respond to their desire to fufill emptiness. I thought Cohen's story was insightful and eerily on-target for any women that recognizes that feeling of "finding the right person to complete me" . At times I grew
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 annoyed reading her repetitive descriptions of her behavior, but quickly realized I was moved to frustration with her for not being able to break free from her behavior, and then myself for relating to her and my own inability to stop making the similar mistakes. By the end of the book, I was genuinely rooting for Cohen to find happiness within herself. I also just finished reading Tucker Max's "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell." Talk about a good pairing to reflect upon women and sexuality....Cohen's writing style invites you into her world and delivers a story that will make you reflect upon your own choices and judgements of others.
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LibraryThing member fanoftheoffice
This is a good read, and I suspect most women will either recognize themselves in the story or someone they know. The book is very relatable in that way. I really liked the pacing of the book, she didn't dwindle too long on any one relationship and wasn't long winded in her self-analysis. The
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 ending is also quite well done, satisfactory but not perfect. The only curious element was her habit of calling all the men she was with "boys" even when she was with adult men and was in probably her late twenties. Otherwise though, this is an interesting read.
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LibraryThing member bethany817two
This book chronicles the author's descent into reckless promiscuity as she unsuccessfully seeks love and approval from everyone she encounters, particularly men. While I found her story engrossing, it wasn't especially satisfying; it's hard to read about someone making the same mistakes over and
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 over. At times, I found myself more interested in the author's sister and the sister's problems than in the author herself.
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LibraryThing member Katie_H
I'm torn on this one. "Loose Girl" was a quick and engaging read, and an interesting memoir, but, after having read the description on the back, it was different than I had expected. Yes, Kerry, was a troubled girl, and yes, she was promiscuous, but I do not believe that she was suffering from
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 sexual addiction. She made poor decisions with regards to sex, and she searched for love and attention in the wrong places, but all of these disfunctional activities are common in adolescent and young women, especially those with abandonment issues similar to those Kerry struggled with. The destructive cycle continued until Kerry realized that love and sex are two completely different things, that occasionally, if one is lucky, overlap from time to time. I recognize many of Kerry's qualities in most of the women I know, which brought the narrative close to home, but it also resulted in my increased skepticism of her affliction. Missing from the book is a detailed account of her catharsis; her "recovery" is tacked onto the end in the last five pages, which amounts to an unsatisfying ending.
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LibraryThing member Nitestar
Kerry Cohen has written a heartbreakingly honest and scary memoir about her life. As a younger version of herself, Kerry realizes that she has "the power" over men and somewhere along the line, she decides to use it.

Loose Girl is a fragile, scary and absolutely riveting memoir in which Cohen opens
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 up about her promiscuity and how she worked very hard at getting to understand that sexuality and intimacy are not always related.

Cohen pulls no punches about her journey of self-disovery and I highly recommend this book
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Subjects

Promiscuity United States
Teenage girls United States Sexual behavior Case studies

Language

English

Original language

English

Original publication date

2008-06-03

Physical description

210 p.; 6.13 inches

ISBN

1401303498 / 9781401303495

Local notes

autobiography

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