Erika Schickel

The Big Hurt Erika Schickel

This complex memoir shows what it was like growing up in the shadow of a literary father and a neglectful mother, getting thrown out of boarding school after being seduced by a teacher, and all of the later-life consequences that ensue. In 1982, Erika Schickel was expelled from her East Coast prep school for sleeping with a teacher. She was that girl--rebellious, precocious, and macking for love. Seduced, caught, and then whisked away in the night to avoid scandal, Schickel writes a provocative, searing, and darkly funny memoir, The Big Hurt, explores the question, How did that girl turn out?Schickel came of age in the 1970s, the progeny of two writers: Richard Schickel, the prominent film critic for Time magazine, and Julia Whedon, a melancholy mid-list novelist. In the wake of her parents' ugly divorce, Erika was packed off to a bohemian boarding school in the Berkshires. The Big Hurt tells two coming-of-age stories: one of a lost girl in a predatory world and the other of that girl grown up, who in reckoning with her past ends up recreating it with a notorious Los Angeles crime novelist, blowing up her marriage, and casting herself into the second exile of her life. The Big Hurt looks at a legacy of shame handed down through a maternal bloodline and the cost of epigenetic trauma. It shines a light on the haute culture of 1970s Manhattan that made girls grow up too fast. It looks at the long shadow cast by great, monstrously self-absorbed literary lives and the ways in which women pin themselves like beautiful butterflies to the spreading board of male ego.