Opinion

Rebel with a Cause

The best, most compelling narratives about religious piety end one of two ways: The believer must either be gruesomely martyred or go very, very bad. At least when it comes to Catholics.

Carlene Bauer was raised an evangelical Christian in New Jersey, and though her rebellion was mild — expressed through a love of new wave music and Sassy magazine, the instruments of the white middle-class suburban girl’s revolt circa 1988 — her memoir is anything but ordinary. “Not That Kind of Girl” is the story of a young woman who wants to go bad but just can’t, who falls in love with books and the libertines who wrote them yet hews to religious dogma, who wants boys in fistfights over her yet remains a virgin well into her 20s.

This last detail is, of course, the gimmick, the thing that sets Bauer’s memoir apart from the hundreds of other accounts of suburban ennui and urban self-actualization published every year. Also, there’s this: Bauer can write. She is an observer, an expert analyzer of herself and others, a stylist. On her dawning teenage infatuation with Sylvia Plath et. al: “If you were a smart girl, said the lives of the poets we read that year, you also had a responsibility to be a seductive and dangerous girl. Art required of you not just a singular imagination, but a talent for flirtation and self-destruction.” At its best, her book approaches the greatness of Mary Cantwell’s lovely, brutal memoir “Manhattan, When I Was Young.”

Bauer is unquestionably bright, so her naivete when it comes to religion can, at times, be frustrating; it undercuts her book smarts. After becoming disillusioned with evangelical Christianity, she gravitates toward Catholicism, extolling such exotica as soup kitchens and nuns as evidence of a progressive nature. (Eventually, she concedes that the Church’s stance on things like birth control, the role of women, and its silence during the Holocaust to be problematic.)

But she also likes the lackadaisical attitude of the flock, and is, tellingly, drawn to it. She’s pleasantly surprised when her first Mass “ended not with a hymn but a mass exodus that occurred right after communion when everyone fled down the aisles . . . That was when I learned that to be Catholic was to belong to an ethnic group, not a religion.”

When Bauer moves to New York City and gets a job in publishing, it’s gratifying to see her bloom, however late, into a girl who leaves the house after 10 to meet a boy at a bar for an open-ended night of booze and rock — “the romance of pure hanging out, of making a date for the languorous exchange of opinion.” She falls in love, she thinks. She learns to like beer, to appreciate the punctuation of a good swear word. She loses her virginity, but this takes place offstage — an odd choice given the very subject of her memoir. She breaks a heart. Good stuff.

Aside from a cloying, pathological need to be ever the good girl, even as an adult — she fantasizes about breaking a leg so she can stay home and read rather than just calling in sick — Bauer is an eminently sympathetic character, her memoir a beauty and an original. Admirably, she does not spare herself, and her struggle between faith and intellect, spiritual and corporeal, comes to a surprising denouement: well before the end, Bauer stops believing in God, thereby proving herself to be more of a bad-ass than she ever dared hope.

Not That Kind of Girl

By Carlene Bauer

HarperCollins