JOLETTE

Pseudonymous author Mitchell shares reflections on her tumultuous teenage years in this debut memoir.

The author writes that she discovered that she was pregnant in 1974, just a few months after her boyfriend—the baby’s father—had moved across the country with his family, from Minnesota to Arizona. She was 16, and when she refused to get an abortion, she says, her parents kicked her out of the house and she ended up in a foster home. She got a job as a nanny; gave birth to a daughter, whom she put up for adoption; graduated high school; and started taking college classes at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. There, she met an ex-felon, married him, and briefly attended the Women’s Army Corps boot camp before following her new spouse to Alaska. The marriage quickly fell apart, which began a period of travel for the author that would take her around the United States and as far away as Colombia and Tunis, working as a fishing hand, a drug runner, a journalism student, and a sex worker. She did much of it while grappling with epileptic seizures and self-destructive behavior. In recounting it all, Mitchell effectively highlights her wryly philosophical disposition: “It’s nice to think that there is a universal power adoringly watching us face challenges, giving gentle guidance, knowing what lessons we each must learn for some reason,” she writes. “But probably it’s just random. Us on a rocky planet. Stars and debris colliding, causing reverberations….” The events of the book leap around in time, allowing Mitchell to portray the sense of dislocation that she felt during her travels and experiences. However, the story always returns to her years in Seattle, showing how she got to know herself through sex work while fearing  possible threat of the local Green River Killer. It’s the stuff of Beat Generation novels—a raw and revealing story.

A deeply felt story of a woman’s eventful life on society’s margins in 1970s and ’80s America.