Love and Trouble: A Mid-Life Reckoning

"And there she is. That horrible girl." In the middle of life, after decades of working, marrying, and mothering responsibly, Dederer suddenly felt the restless desires of a teenager welling up again, driving her to revisit her youth as a "disastrous pirate slut of a girl." Love and Trouble has all the charm and insight of her excellent first memoir, Poser, but it digs down to a further stratum of self-examination and candor. Amid the comfortably familiar trappings of her story (e.g. her Ave rat's map of the U District circa 1984), she is discomfitingly, fearlessly frank about what it was—and is—like to desire, and to be desired. As a memoir of an adventurous, intelligent woman looking back on her Seattle youth, it belongs right next to Mary McCarthy's classic Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.