UNSEXED

DelVecchio charts her path to autonomy in this wrenching memoir.

As a young girl raised in the milieu of sex work, the author was plagued by questions about female bodies—what value they possess, how they are used, and who controls them. Such questions filled her with trepidation and vigilance regarding her own body. Born in Greece, DelVecchio experienced an early childhood marked by hunger, homelessness, abuse, abandonment, and neglect. After her birth mother stabbed her father in the eye with a red stiletto, he left the family, and her mother’s extramarital sexual relationships gained a new purpose beyond pleasure. A man named Kristos, as DelVecchio recalls, was the pimp under whose direction her mother first sold sex to another man—who paid her with a roasted chicken. Kristos told DelVecchio, “I will teach you to be a woman. A good woman. Like your mother.” An orphanage, though it had its own perils, offered an escape. At the age of 8, the author was adopted and raised in the United States by an American Greek woman (characterized by DelVecchio as a “virgin”) whose sexual compass pointed in the opposite direction from her birth mother’s. The memoir dissects how, as the author was caught between these two extremes, she came to consider herself “unsexed.” In a prologue, DelVecchio writes an achingly earnest and disheartening open letter to the body that she has struggled to feel at home in, almost as if speaking to a lover whom she has equally controlled and spurned. This introduction sets the tone for the excoriating exploration of how that relationship came to be. While the narrative’s structure, centering around her birth mother, adoptive mother, and husband (in order of appearance), is a serviceable setup for this exploration, within each section, chapters often rehash and repeat passages and events. Still, the work remains an eye-opening take on sexuality and the intractably complicated politics of a woman’s body.

A feminist daughter of a sex worker redefines herself in this searching remembrance.