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The Torn Skirt: A Fierce Literary Portrait of Raw Teenage Desire and Dangerous Longing Reissue Edition
Author(s): Rebecca Godfrey (Author)
- Publisher: Harper Perennial
- Publication Date: August 12, 2008
- Edition: Reissue
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 0061567108
- ISBN-13: 9780061567100
Book Description
From Rebecca Godfrey, author of UNDER THE BRIDGE – now streaming on Hulu, starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough – a fierce and tender portrait of two weeks in the life of a troubled teenager.
“The Torn Skirt is a hot book, a thrilling romance of teen rage and longing – like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, except about girls.” — Mary Gaitskill, author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior
At Mt. Douglas (a.k.a. Mt. Drug) High, all the girls have feathered hair, and the sweet scent of Love’s Baby Soft can’t hide the musk of raw teenage anger, apathy, and desire. Sara Shaw is a girl full of fever and longing, a girl looking for something risky, something real. Her only possible salvation comes in the willowy form of the mysterious Justine, the outlaw girl in the torn skirt. The search for Justine will lead Sara on a daring odyssey into an underworld of hookers and johns, junkies and thieves, runaway girls and skater boys, and, ultimately, into a violent tragedy.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“The Torn Skirt is a hot book, a thrilling romance of teen rage and longing — like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, except about girls.” – Mary Gaitskill, author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin
“A serious bullet of a book….Godfrey constantly impresses with her precise eye and impassioned tone. A bright new voice.” – Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“[The] voice of the bad girls…[a] literary rebellion.” – Maclean’s
“The Torn Skirt inspired a range of rabid fans, from literary hipsters to renegade kids.” – Rolling Stone
“I loved and believed that narrative of a 16 year old mind—immature, abandoned and yet exploding. It came from a heartfelt and true perception, an authentic writers’ desire. Which made it rock.” – Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth
“No one understands the teenage mind like Rebecca Godfrey. An no one can penetrate its darkest recesses with such insight and compassion.” – Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
“A dizzying mix of hope and despair.” – Oregonian
“Captivating . . . Stark and bewitching . . . A voice that is fresh, disaffected and angst-ridden . . . Sara is afflicted with an overwhelming sense of compassion . . . Her world is a persuasive one, as malignant and addictive as a cigarette.” – New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
At Mt. Douglas (a.k.a. Mt. Drug) High, all the girls have feathered hair, and the sweet scent of Love’s Baby Soft can’t hide the musk of raw teenage anger, apathy, and desire. Sara Shaw is a girl full of fever and longing, a girl looking for something risky, something real. Her only possible salvation comes in the willowy form of the mysterious Justine, the outlaw girl in the torn skirt. The search for Justine will lead Sara on a daring odyssey into an underworld of hookers and johns, junkies and thieves, runaway girls and skater boys, and, ultimately, into a violent tragedy.
About the Author
Rebecca Godfrey (1967–2022) was an award-winning novelist and journalist. Her books include The Torn Skirt, finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; the award-winning true crime story Under the Bridge, the inspiration behind a Hulu limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough as Rebecca Godfrey; and her final novel Peggy, a fictionalized account of Peggy Guggenheim’s coming of age. Godfrey earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and taught writing at Columbia University. She lived with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Torn Skirt
A NovelBy Rebecca Godfrey
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Rebecca Godfrey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061567100
Chapter One
Blame it on the Pleasure Family. Blame it on the Vietnam War. Blame it on a lot of things. But don’t blame it on Justine. She was just a weak, scared girl; a lost, violent girl. A lot of things, she was. Was.
Or don’t blame it on anything. Call it inevitable, call it the doomed fate of love. Call it karmic, fucked up, the dance of the wolves. Live it, love it, call it life. Call it Led Zeppelin. Yeah, yeah. Really, I don’t really, really don’t fucking care.
I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years. High school, I was a good girl. I was pretty, I smiled, I fit in fine. And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned, though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me. 102 degrees, it returned for no reason. It returned around the time I met Justine, but blame it on her bad influence and you’d be all wrong.
I come out into the kitchen, have my little chat with the cop. Unsmiling, I get to him. I’m sure of it. All the teen girls on this hick island have flipped-back Farrah Fawcett hair, willing-to-please eyes shadowed in baby blue. Me, in my little shredded dress and desecrated eyes. I don’t shock him, but I’m not what he hoped for. He writes something in his pad.
Teenage Girl. Angst-Ridden. Badly Dyed Hair.
The cop, thirty or so, with a mustache and the dullest eyes, doesn’t ask about Justine. He asks what time I expect my mother back.
“Is that relevant to the case?”
“Relevant? That’s a big word for a little girl.”
Suddenly, I’m nauseous. I’m reeling. I’m realizing all the things I don’t have words for. The world for him a pad of dates, names, serial numbers, license plates. He’d need a soundtrack for his report, a rush of images: her legs alone, her legs kicking backwards, the slit of her skirt ripping as she ran, her legs like wishbones.
Some more notes in his pad now; I imagine them.
Single-Parent Family. Headed by Father. That Crazy Diehard Hippie.
And get this: the cop is checking me out. I thought the sight of me might disgust him, but I should have known. just because I’m soft-skinned and sixteen, they get this sick, weak look. Speed kicking in, not making me mellow, lazy, hazy, and high. Making me violent and blue, restless and aware of all the things I’ve got to do. All the things I’ve got to do.
“Touch my forehead,” I tell him.
He does this, with little hesitation.
“You’re hot.”
“Yeah, I seem to be coming down with a bit of a fever.”
“Maybe you should lie down and we can talk in your room.”
“This whole thing has been very disturbing for me.”
“I’m sure it has been,” he says. “Disturbing, that’s a good word.”
He stands up. Moves toward me.
“I have a fever,” I tell him. “You’d better stay away.”
I head for my bedroom, and hear him walking away past the marijuana plants that line my father’s shelves.
He’s left my house and gone to jerk off, I bet. Jerk off in the front seat of his cruiser. I’m in my bedroom and he’s imagining me here. A little girlyworld of Maybelline and heartthrobs Scotch-taped above pink pillows. Really, it’s a bare room of white walls and Justine’s books and skirts scattered all over the floor.
I try to sleep, but sleep’s not easy when you’re on speed. I guess the cop never left because now he’s knocking on my door. I ask him to leave; I tell him I’m too hot to talk. Fuck. He says we must, but I won’t. Just laughing at the thought of him banging down the bedroom door of a teenage girl. He imagines it pink and soft. He has no idea.
In The Bushes With The Burnout Boys
I guess all this shit started when I was in the bush. I loved the bush. Behind our school, it was like some tangled, rising creature, hands reaching skyward; a thousand savage, skinny fingers. Evergreens and Scotch pines twisting with blackberry bushes and dead oaks. Mornings before school, I used to head into it with my stupid Swiss Army knife. Hack and chop a path leading into a clearing. And at lunch hour, I’d bring the burnout boys in.
I’m not making this up: the burnout boys all had one-syllable names: Bryce, Bruce, Dean, and Dale. They were only a bit wayward, but they thought they were real rebels. Bragging as they brought out their plastic baggies of mushrooms and weed.
May: the bush was rainsoaked; we were whacked around as we went in. I lifted branches back, holding them so the burnouts could enter. We sat on the ground, in a dry place, hidden from the concrete slab of our school. Here, the mountains faded from view. The blue sky went white.
It began to rain again, the pale, common May rain. I sat down on the dirt, lay back with my hair on a broad, mossy rock. The air smelled great at this moment — it smelled like rot and rain and Christmas.
Bryce drove his red pickup truck to the bush and opened the front door. Twelve o’clock: the Power Hour. Burnouts loved the Power Hour. Heaven. For them. They know every word. They sang along, pretending guitars were in their hands. They sang the Lemon Song to me.
Squeeze me baby so the juice runs down my leg.
My father used to say his generation fucked up in a lot of ways, but at least they invented rock and roll…
Continues…
Excerpted from The Torn Skirtby Rebecca Godfrey Copyright © 2008 by Rebecca Godfrey. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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