It is amazing how many women's memoirs of teenage disaster in the still of suburbia have appeared in recent years--Beverly Donofrio's Riding in Cars with Boys, Betsy Israel's Grown Up Fast, Susan Gordon Lydon's tale of twenty years of heroin addiction titled Take the Long Way Home, the now-classic anonymous diary of a juvenile junkie called Go Ask Alice, among others. The fictional renditions of the same source material--Joyce Carol Oates' Foxfire, Alice McDermott's That Night, Susan Taylor Chehak's Smithereens, Joyce Maynard's ambitious novelization of the Pam Smart case, To Die For--are never-ending. While most of these books don't become best-sellers, they are literary staples, constants. City-girl stories are never quite so gothic, the pregnancy scares and peyote incidents never quite so brutal, the botched abortions and crime scenes never quite so bloody--possibly because the dreary, dull suburban landscape is fallow ground for a teenage wasteland. Which reminds us why it is the fifties, when everyone migrated out to their subdivisions, and not the sixties, when everyone went nuts because of those same subdivisions, that mark the decline of American life.

All these narratives of suburban girlhood seem to revolve around a simple set of plot points: a boredom, almost from birth, that would appear to be depression but is soon mistaken for mischief; a desire, at an early age, to be seductive; a belief, at a later age, that acting on this desire can be fun; and finally watching as it all comes back in haunting horror; followed by a realization that the ghastly consequences--unwanted pregnancy, disease, crime, prison--will be paid for by the girls alone, and the guys are not even going to be supportive. In fact, many of them won't even be around to be supportive. And the boys who have not fled in horror will often turn on them: they'll sell stories to Inside Edition, they'll pretend they don't know her, they'll be the first in school to spray-paint "SLUT" in scarlet letters across her locker. Parents are always far too far away to notice what is going on until a pregnancy starts to show or a syringe punctures a hole in a trash bag--and even then they try not to notice. Loneliness is the leitmotif, and it hardly seems surprising that sex or drugs become the frenzy in which all this isolation gets lost. But in a strange turn of exuberance, the loneliness that these remedies ultimately only serve to magnify seems an acceptable price to pay for the brief freedom they allow. "There was the daytime world, the public world, in which we all had families, went to school, took directions from adults, and lied all the time without even thinking about it," Kathy Dobie writes in her Harper's essay. "Sex blew this world open . . ."

One of the truest, most upsetting and oddly literary portraits of suburbia as hidden hell is actually a movie. Smooth Talk is a creepy, unsettling adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates short story "Do You Know Where You're Going? Do You Know Where You've Been?" Put on film by Joyce Chopra, one of the rare female directors at that time (whose reputation was later destroyed when she was one in a series of people at the helm of Bright Lights, Big City, a mistake of a movie for reasons beyond mere misdirection), the 1985 release is mostly about Laura Dern's obnoxious, awkward sexual awakening in small-town California at age fifteen. There is so much in the movie that is so accurate, painfully so--Dern's gawkiness, her poor posture and, above all, her obvious discomfort in her own body that gives a sense of a girl who was not a real cutie pie through childhood, but is now blonde and leggy and not quite able to handle the attention she gets from boys at the mall, boys at the soda-pop joint, boys everywhere. She is mystified by her sudden power at the same time that it makes her feel superior to her plain, homely family (Mary Kay Place plays the mom, if that gives you some idea); it makes her feel that she's got a secret that is too significant to be interrupted by her mother's concern with painting the house or her sister's interest in her dolls.

And, of course, that's the nature of the cleft that occurs at adolescence: the family can't see what the world has started to notice--or, more likely, they willfully ignore it, pretend that sex has not invaded their space with the suddenness of a bad odor--so there's no way for a girl to be a comfortable, integrated person at home. The constant jones to get out of the house is all about going to a place where it's possible for authenticity--or, failing that, the mall, the drive-in and worse--but that too is disappointing because the boys you neck with or the ones who buy you milk shakes cannot recognize you for the sweet little girl you are, they can't see that only an hour before you were washing the dinner dishes or refurnishing your dollhouse. A terrible, sinking personality split becomes inevitable, as Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown document so well in Meeting at the Crossroads, and the result, as portrayed in Smooth Talk, is a lack of conviction that makes Dern's character easy to hate. The loneliness Dern feels when she's trying to talk to her mom, paired with the antsiness she feels out on a date, should inspire sympathy, but instead just meets with our disgust. The audience starts to hope that this girl gets what's coming.

And in this, too, Smooth Talk is unusually accurate. Teenage girls, who more than at any other time in a woman's life perhaps, really just need someone to talk to, often sabotage themselves by giving off so many mixed messages that no one around them knows what to do, and everyone is just so sick of the sulleness and snideness. They are like starving stray cats, and all you want to do is bring them some leftover marrow bones and rub them behind the ears because they are so pretty and fuzzy--but all they want to do is scratch your hand and give you rabies because you might be the same person who threw stones at them earlier. The discomfort of watching Dern's act is almost too much, and yet it's one of the few truthful adolescent portraits I have seen at the movies, one of the few where the girl is not a vapid sex kitten or a mother murderer, where she is not sexy and seventeen or acne-scarred and dangerous; Dern comes across as just plain old confused. It is a spectacular performance.

The red-hot center of Smooth Talk involves an older greaser, played by Treat Williams, talking his way into the girl's house while the family is away for the afternoon--Dern, cranky and cross as usual, can't be bothered to join them. After about an hour of obnoxious cajoling through the screen door, when Williams finally gets the girl into his car and onto her back for the classic American sexual initiation in the wheat fields, it's hard to know if it's rape or seduction or what. There's a lot of symbolism bound up in the doorway, which gets locked and unlocked and fidgeted with as Williams' harangue goes on and on. It's the movie's one heavy-handed, graceless moment: the house, which is the universal symbol of family, is safe; once Dern walks out the door, she's basically consenting to whatever. And yet, the tribulations of adolescence are honestly stated: Laura Dern played with halters and short shorts and cutoffs and fire and other raw, rough attempts at sexy because she thought boys were fun; the real consequences of sexy--the men who may not be so fun--no one warned her about, because a conspiracy of silence surrounds the grimy thought of what happens to any girl who goes out looking for it, looking for anything. This girl was definitely out there looking for trouble, but no one bothered to tell her that trouble shows up the way it wants to, that it doesn't stop when you say stop, that men read sexual innuendo any which way they like, that as jailbait you can go fishing but you can't know if you'll catch a fluke or a shark, that you've got to expect to be eaten alive. Brooke Shields may not have known what she meant about nothing coming between her and her Calvins, but zillions of men knew just what she didn't know she meant--the pubescent virgin of those ads sums up nicely what post-structuralists mean when they say that the signifier and signified do not have to have a meeting of minds--and this is why parents wish they could just keep their teenage daughters locked up in the house. Meanwhile, Treat Williams is able to achieve his own version of breaking and entering just by smooth talking the girl into going for a ride with him because she doesn't know what else to do.

Hey little girl is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? Mm-hmm I got a bad desire


Without particularly meaning to, Smooth Talk explains why date rape is so troublesome: she didn't say no, she didn't say yes, she could have refused, she didn't refuse--and yet it seems certain that a real violation has occurred. But the movie doesn't deal with that. That's not really the point. This isn't a movie about the law or personal politics--it's about a girl learning her lot in life as a woman, learning the lesson of Dinah and Tamar, learning that no one really cares how she feels. It ends with Dern, her sister and her mother dancing in the living room while James Taylor sings "Handyman." It's stark and awful, the two sisters doing a box step like an awkward couple during "Beth" or "Endless Love" at the senior prom, both of them seem lonely for company and comfort, and the mother seems relieved, for the moment, to have her little girls back. The father is nowhere to be found--he's out fixing the car or getting the barbecue going, doing some guy thing.

I fix broken hearts / Baby I'm your handyman

It's hard not to be flooded with images of the perfect high school crush, of James Taylor the way he was in Two-Lane Blacktop, the sweet preppy boy of unhappy Mnemsha, a blue-eyed beauty with long dark hair, a junkie, a McLean's refugee, a man who would never do what the guy in Smooth Talk did, he is the perfect image of the boy Laura Dern went out looking for, someone romantic and off-kilter and tongue-tied with a pretty, pretty voice and an acoustic guitar that he bought from a guy who said it once belonged to Jaco Pastorius. Or something like that. James Taylor, such as he was in the early seventies, is the boy every girl should have lost her virginity to.

But it's never like that.

The lingering image is that women have to fend for themselves, that the father is just a shadow in the house and that this sweet moment, this family dance, is all the more precious because it's nostalgic--far from being a return to innocence it is only a brief reprieve from confusion that is only going to get worse with the years, it is as awful as the final sentence of The Good Earth when the sons promise the father that they'll never sell the land, "but behind his back they smiled." These are smiles that imply everything that will go wrong in China for the next century. And the foreboding left at the end of Smooth Talk is so thick, thick as anything Pearl Buck could have imagined, because it predicts damage done to daughters for generations.
Excerpted from Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Copyright © 1998 by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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