THE VIRGIN CHRONICLES

A meditation on virginity, sexual pressure, and looking for love.

In this intriguingly titled memoir, DelVecchio, a professor at Durham Technical Community College in North Carolina and the author of the YA novel Dear Jane(2019), offers an engaging and sometimes troubling account of a contemporary young woman dealing with sexual expectations, stereotyping, and the male gaze. The remembrance focuses mainly on her account of how she lived in the shadow of a controlling, censorious mother and how the author saw preserving her virginity as an act of empowerment. The author, who was adopted in Greece at the age of 8, was born to a mother who was a sex worker, which later became the basis for her adoptive mother’s labeling her a “putana”(a derogatory Greek term that the author translates as whore) and trying to exert influence on every aspect of her life. Nonetheless, DelVecchio managed to have a social life while working her way through college, and she eventually stood up to her adoptive mother. Interestingly, though, the question of her moving out and living with roommates never comes up, which, considering that she paid rent to her adoptive mother, leaves unanswered questions. One ongoing thread is her long search for a romantic partner who would love her for herself and not just pursue her for sex. Throughout, she tells of limiting her sexual activity with each partner, but eventually, she would feel that she was giving too much of herself away, and each relationship failed. She periodically affirms what she feels was the rightness of not “going all the way” with each partner—including in an account of when she found that a former boyfriend got another young woman pregnant out of wedlock. As a result, the litany of failed relationships can get repetitive. However, it does lay the groundwork for a lovely surprise later in the narrative, although the author leaves the reader hanging as to what eventually happened later in her romantic life. Even with these minor flaws, though, this memoir is a thoughtful and highly readable account of dealing with sexual expectations.

A personal and often engaging story of struggling with questions of sex and self-esteem.