THE BIG HURT

A memoir of two difficult affairs that bookended the author’s life.

Los Angeles–based writer Schickel was a teenager when her divorced, distracted parents sent her to a “progressive, bohemian boarding school from 1978 to 1982.” She was doing well—on track to graduate—when, without warning, she was expelled from the school following an “affair” with a teacher. In her second book, the author revisits the traumatic events of her adolescence and also describes the affair she had decades later, when she was married with two daughters. The second affair—with a thinly disguised James Ellroy (whom she refers to as Sam Spade, the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon)—repeated some of the abusive patterns of the first, though it took Schickel many years to recognize that her teacher had, in fact, abused her. The memoir is well written, and the two intertwining stories are well-structured. However, the author is repetitive about certain elements (her sex life with Ellroy) and sparse on others, like how she finally came to reconcile the two major traumas of her life. “Rather than tell the truth about my past,” she writes, “it would be easier for me to sacrifice my reputation, my career, my marriage, my closest friendships, my children, and my identity to become his lover.” Schickel is a fluid writer and can be funny, occasionally hilarious, but when she strains toward humor amid a painful recollection, the humor often falls flat. Still, her narrative timing is often spot-on. For example, when she finally tells her husband about Ellroy, he asks where she would like to go on vacation. “Nowhere,” she replies. “You don’t want to go on vacation?” he asks. “No.” “Okay, then what do you want?” “I want a divorce, Paul.” That moment carries both weight and wit, and the scenes in which Schickel digs the deepest leave the longest-lasting impact—if only there were more of them.

A flawed yet affecting portrait of a vicious, repetitive cycle.