Girl Gone Mild

Dawn Bauer In Not That Kind of Girl, Carlene Bauer turns the wild-chick confessional upside down. An evangelical Christian, she aspires to be a literary hipster in New York—while keeping her faith.

The last few years have been good for girls-gone-wild confessionals. Koren Zailckas chronicled her fall-down-drunk years in the bestselling Smashed. Kerry Cohen vividly described the STDs she contracted from men she didn't particularly like in Loose Girl. And if the profiles in Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pig are any indication, the woman next door is seriously considering having a stripper pole installed in her pantry. Carlene Bauer's precisely observed debut defiantly announces that she was Not That Kind of Girl. She confesses instead to going mild, and her droll account of the wages of being good is well worth the extended examination she gives it in this surprisingly provocative memoir.

Anyone who doubts that highly educated urbanites can be as narrow-minded and provincial as the residents of Our Town should read Bauer’s accounts of explaining her virginity to shocked, uncomprehending partygoers.

You see, Bauer was a young evangelical Christian with a taste for Sylvia Plath. She had a run-of-the-mill fundamentalist education, her parents were capable, she excelled in school. Had she been content to stay in her hometown along the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border, she presumably could have scratched her creative itches with a booth at the local craft fair. Her story would be interesting but unremarkable.

But Bauer ups the ante, and as she narrates her misfit high-school and college years, her singular vision becomes clear: She aspires not only to be truly hip, she also wants to be taken seriously in New York's snobbish literary scene. And she seeks to accomplish both of these goals while hanging on to her fervent faith in Jesus Christ. If life maneuvers received scores for technical difficulty, Bauer would be competing for gold.

That a contemporary America besotted by culture war has trouble categorizing such focus-group-unfriendly people is no revelation. Perhaps leery of accusations that she can't claim authentic membership in either camp, Bauer stocks her pilgrim's progress with exhaustive details establishing her cultural bona fides. She sees Plath as "a godless version of Ecclesiastes' Preacher." Bauer can't stomach the "effeminate earnestness" and touchy-feely casualness of the contemporary Middle American worship services, and so imagines a Jesus more like Ted Hughes—she'd prefer a divinity who'd rip your headband off and demand your attention—or the one conjured in The Replacements' song "Can't Hardly Wait." ("Jesus rides beside me / He never buys any smokes.") In other moods, Bauer decides Jesus had a lot in common with Hamlet, albeit less conflicted about his relationship with his dad.

Not That Kind of Girl. By Carlene Bauer. 288 pages. Harper. $24.99. But if Not That Kind of Girl were only concerned about asserting that it's possible to have experienced both Bible class and CBGB's—and to not feel the need to apologize for either—the end result would be far less nourishing than it proves to be. As Bauer moves herself and the PG-13 action to New York's publishing world, her trained eye finds more demanding subjects, and the book widens to become a meditation on staying true to who you are when it's far from established that who you are does you any worldly good.

"Neither class anxiety nor Christianity were considered real, or fashionable, torments," she says of her faltering attempts at the professional cocktail banter required in the media industry. "We had to depend on the kindness of strangers phoning other strangers on our behalf," she says of her cohort of twentysomething Lost Girls who had plunked themselves down in New York with no money and no connections, their few possessions stuffed in milk crates on bare floors. "And strangers had been kind." But when they weren't, Bauer continues, it seemed the floorboards might give way, her talent unnoticed and mourned by no one.