When she was barely 18, Erika Schickel made a horrendous romantic decision. Nearly three decades later, she made another one. In the pain-drenched but clear-sighted The Big Hurt, Schickel takes a microscope to both choices and to the social forces that facilitated them. "What if every decision I had made since 1982 was built on the faulty premise that I was a 'bad girl'?" she wonders. "What if all along I had just been a very hurt girl trying to survive in a predatory world?"
The first romantic debacle occurs in 1982, when Schickel is a senior at a Massachusetts boarding school. After her affair with married teacher Henry Baker goes public, he's fired and she's asked to leave the school. The second misbegotten romance, which begins in 2009, is with a famous crime novelist whom Schickel refers to as Sam Spade. (His true identity will be obvious to fans of noir fiction.) Schickel leaves her husband of 20 years, with whom she has two daughters, for Spade, who, like Baker, ultimately kicks her to the curb.
The Big Hurt bounces around in time, interweaving Schickel's bittersweet memories of her parents, novelist Julia Whedon and film critic Richard Schickel, who gave her a privileged Manhattan childhood but not much guidance. Schickel (You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom) is a resourceful writer who can find humor in even the self-sabotaging habits that drove her romantic misadventures. The result is a dirty-laundry-airing memoir of the highest order. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer