Dobie, Kathy

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DOBIE, Kathy

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Dial Press, Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

The Only Girl in the Car: A Memoir, Dial Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals and Web sites, including Village Voice, Harper's, Vibe, Tikkun, Salon.com, and Pacific News Service.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kathy Dobie is a respected writer who published an account of her teen years in the 1960s in The Only Girl in the Car: A Memoir. Dobie also wrote about this period of her life in Harper's in 1996. Both her article and her memoir relate her longing for sexual relations from a young age and her loss of virginity at fourteen years old.

Dobie grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, in a large, loving Catholic family. Her father was an administrator at Yale University in nearby New Haven, and her mother was a homemaker. Dobie was the third child and eldest girl and helped with the care of her younger siblings.

In the Harper's article, she wrote, "When I was in my teens, my mother told me that I didn't seem to like being held or touched as a child—I cringed, I grew stiff—so she and my father made a decision not to. They would wait until I came to them. And they waited and waited. For it seems the touch I wanted wasn't familial, wasn't even 'loving.' That affection was for good little girls, and it made me feel like an imposter, made me lonelier."

Dobie's first infatuation came in fourth grade, with the kind of boy she was destined to be drawn to. He had a shaved head and wore Nazi insignias and a trench coat. "He was my ally in a world that seemed increasingly cold," Dobie remembered. Her lust was fed by the large pornography collections of a family for which she babysat. While on a family vacation, she sat in the rear window of the motor home and flirted with the male drivers of cars and trucks that passed by. Two of them followed the family to a campground but left in a huff when the child who had promised more turned out to be merely a tease.

But Dobie's sexuality was obvious to the men and boys who saw her, including her father's own friends. When she made the decision to lose her virginity, she sat on her front lawn with her dog, wearing a halter top, hiphugger jeans, and platform shoes until a man came along who would relieve her of it. She was fourteen. But Dobie wanted boys her own age, and she began to frequent the Teen Center, just blocks from her house, and hang out with the bad boys who congregated there. She was often the only girl in the car. These boys had girlfriends who wouldn't give them sex, and Dobie soon became the one to satisfy their needs, infuriating the girls and gaining her a reputation as a promiscuous teen.

She was warned of the danger she was inviting, particularly by a group of black friends, but Dobie did not heed the warnings. She became a frequent partner of a boy she calls Joey, a handsome, motorcycle-jacket wearing young hood who worked in his father's gas station. On the night around which the memoir revolves, Dobie and Joey were in his car with three other boys, along with a bottle of gin and a case of beer. They stopped the car, and the three got out so that Dobie and Joey could have sex. But when they were finished, Joey told her he wanted them to see how good she was.

"It doesn't matter what was said," Dobie wrote in the article, "only that it came out of Joey's mouth and that no other world existed for me that night—just those boys, that car in the snowy woods. That was the moment when everything that had been said about me became real, when I gave up."

News of that episode quickly spread, and the kids at the Teen Center screamed insults at her and were intent on beating her up. The director drove her home before that happened, and Dobie never returned. Instead, she took mature men for lovers, and at sixteen she worked in the kitchens at Yale, unloading trucks, cleaning, and cooking to save enough to move to New York. She was again the only girl on the crew. But in her hometown, she suffered taunts and threats for years after the incident.

In her article, Dobie writes of men who were kind to her, of a Yale student she loved but with whom she never had sex. "A grizzled, gray-haired biker guessed something about me," she wrote, "and when we pulled out of my parents' driveway, he stopped the bike, turned to me, and said, 'Kath, you've got to hold on to me or you'll fall off the bike. I don't know what the boys did to you, but I'm not going to do anything, okay?' And he would sweep me far away from Hamden and into farm fields. After all our rides, we went to his rented room and drank tea."

Rebecca Denton reviewed the book for BookPage online, noting that "What's striking about the book is that Dobie … delves so honestly and fearlessly into a young girl's sexual experiences and attitudes. She doesn't shy away from the image she presents of herself as a reckless, eager teen with no regard for reputation or restraint."

In an online review for Charlotte Observer, Courtney Devores felt that Dobie's memoir should be discussed in light of the fact that many of the same double standards that existed during Dobie's girlhood continue to exist today. "While she admittedly chose her sexually curious path," said Devores, "she was undoubtedly punished for it in a way a boy her age would never be."

Philly.com's Carole Goldberg wrote that "this is a cautionary tale, a dizzying mixture of sunshine and shadows, lyrical and tough-minded. Dobie beautifully evokes the closeness of family life and the restlessness that drives some teenagers to fight free, no matter the cost. Her memoir explains the sexual education of Kathy D. in a way that earns the utmost respect, the very thing she lost that night in that car full of boys."