I first learned of this novel through a tweet by John Green, celebrating the fifth year since its publication. I have a soft spot for YA and I decided to Google Sara Zarr’s “Story of a Girl,” because one of my favorite authors praised it to high heavens and even knew its birthday. When I read the synopsis, I knew I had to check it out. I found it right away and read it quickly. At 192 pages, with a riveting story and an endearing, honest character, it wasn’t really hard to do.
Deanna Lambert wants to skip town and live away from her family. Seems like a typical coming-of-age angst, but the hurt runs much deeper than the average story. See, Deanna Lambert is a sixteen-year-old girl, given a title of “school slut” for having been caught by her father having sex in the backseat of a Buick when she was thirteen. For the next three years, she has been trying (and failing) to come to terms with what she’d done, and to make other people forget about the girl they all thought she was.
We meet Deanna in the summer, where she tries to get a job so she can save up enough money to get out of a damaging home life. She also deals with her self-worth, and thinks of whether or not she deserves better than what she’s getting. “Story of a Girl” tells of how someone so broken and hopeless tries to make sense of things and then tries to move on, even when it seems that no one will let her.
Because of her “past” (if you can call being thirteen that, at sixteen), Deanna has harbored a deep-seated fear that no one will love her the way that she wanted to be loved. There is this fear of nobody choosing her for her, of never seeing her behind the taint of a label that had very flimsy truth to it. Often she talks about declarations, and how nobody ever “declares” her to be theirs:
“What did it feel like, I wondered, to be kissed like that right out in public? Not like some passionate tongue-wrestling thing, just a kiss to declare: We are each other’s. I’ve never been kissed like that, not by Tommy or anyone else. No one had declared me his, not for the world to see, anyway.
And it might sound a little trite, but it’s the little things like this that almost forbids Deanna from moving on: “I should have gotten up, slid into the booth next to her and put my arms around her, hugging her the way she hugged me every time she saw me. [...] I couldn’t be that person, somehow, no matter how much I wanted to. She was inside me; I could see her and picture her, hear her. But who was I to be her? I was Deanna Lambert, eighth-grade slut forever; Tommy’s funny story; my dad’s biggest embarrassment.”
Speaking of being an embarrassment to her father—the narration of the crumbling relationship with her father was one of the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read. I can understand his situation; imagine catching your thirteen-year-old daughter having sex with your son’s seventeen-year-old’s best friend in the backseat of the car! I understand the pain and the hurt, yes, but I don’t understand his response to Deanna. The withdrawal and anger that he kept on drawing out, and the resentment that he allowed to consume him. Somewhere in the middle of the story, where her father draws near to her, she felt a pang of pain and missing.
“I got this strong feeling of missing him, like he was someone who I loved who had died and gone away, someone who was mostly a memory. I wanted to grab him and say okay, I was sorry about Tommy, it was a stupid mistake and I knew I’d hurt him and I wish I hadn’t. Because I did love him. I did. [...] That’s what I figured out that day while he yelled at me. That as much as I’d let him down, he’d let me down, too… He was the dad, he was my dad. That’s when I had to make myself stop loving him. I had to stop remembering the way he used to be, the way we used to be, because if I kept thinking about the old dad every time I looked at him, it would never stop hurting.
Though she had a friend in Jason (one she’s had since she was a kid), she knew she never really belonged to him either, because of Lee, a relatively newcomer in their joint lives who also happens to be Jason’s girlfriend. Lee is a good person, which annoys Deanna because she can’t find a fault in her, something to hate her for. Next to Lee, Deanna feels like a mess, a failure, and ultimately, a bad person.
Zarr crafts a story that is admirable, in that there is no “victim”-blaming (she asked for it—not allowed in this story!), and also no excusing the actions of someone younger just because the older person “should have known better.” It is deeply realistic, always with an outpouring of emotions that are all too real—magnified versions of the self-deprecation and worthlessness that we sometimes fall into. Zarr creates a safe environment in Deanna for people who feel this way to be truly honest with themselves, and to confront these feelings and be told that it’s okay to feel that way, but that it will also get better.
“It came down to the smallest things, really, that a person could do to say I’m sorry, to say it’s okay, to say I forgive you. The tiniest of declarations that built, one on top of the other, until there was something solid beneath your feet. And then… and then. Who knew?”
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