NANNY GOAT, NANNY GOAT
By
A small-town, Southern, would-be sophisticate, 16-year-old Tildy records with clinical precision all the warning signs she gave of an adolescent about to careen off the track after her mother's sudden second marriage and immediate pregnancy. (The ""nanny goat"" in her had always been concealed and she learned her hypocrisy at her mother's expert knee as well as a hatred disguised as love.) Every sign is ignored until, having made herself pregnant by an epileptic young neighbor while setting up her step father as the patsy Papa, she forces the hatred she's always known into the open and confronts, for the first time, the possibility of honest love and forgiveness. Tildy is such a knowing narrator, so coldly and conscientiously hateful, that she does not make a good advocate for her own case.