The Torn Skirt: A Novel

by Rebecca Godfrey

Overview

From Rebecca Godfrey, author of UNDER THE BRIDGE – now streaming on Hulu, starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough – a fierce and tender portrait of two weeks in the life of a troubled teenager.

“The Torn Skirt is a hot book, a thrilling romance of teen rage and longing – like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, except about girls.” — Mary Gaitskill, author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior

At Mt. Douglas (a.k.a. Mt. Drug) High, all the girls have feathered hair, and the sweet scent of Love's Baby Soft can't hide the musk of raw teenage anger, apathy, and desire. Sara Shaw is a girl full of fever and longing, a girl looking for something risky, something real. Her only possible salvation comes in the willowy form of the mysterious Justine, the outlaw girl in the torn skirt. The search for Justine will lead Sara on a daring odyssey into an underworld of hookers and johns, junkies and thieves, runaway girls and skater boys, and, ultimately, into a violent tragedy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061567100
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/12/2008
Series:	P.S. Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	119,491
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	HL670L (what's this?)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Rebecca Godfrey (1967–2022) was an award-winning novelist and journalist. Her books include The Torn Skirt, finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; the award-winning true crime story Under the Bridge, the inspiration behind a Hulu limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough as Rebecca Godfrey; and her final novel Peggy, a fictionalized account of Peggy Guggenheim’s coming of age. Godfrey earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and taught writing at Columbia University. She lived with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.

Read an Excerpt

The Torn Skirt Chapter One

Blame it on the Pleasure Family. Blame it on the Vietnam War. Blame it on a lot of things. But don't blame it on Justine. She was just a weak, scared girl; a lost, violent girl. A lot of things, she was. Was.

Or don't blame it on anything. Call it inevitable, call it the doomed fate of love. Call it karmic, fucked up, the dance of the wolves. Live it, love it, call it life. Call it Led Zeppelin. Yeah, yeah. Really, I don't really, really don't fucking care.

I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years. High school, I was a good girl. I was pretty, I smiled, I fit in fine. And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned, though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me. 102 degrees, it returned for no reason. It returned around the time I met Justine, but blame it on her bad influence and you'd be all wrong.

I come out into the kitchen, have my little chat with the cop. Unsmiling, I get to him. I'm sure of it. All the teen girls on this hick island have flipped-back Farrah Fawcett hair, willing-to-please eyes shadowed in baby blue. Me, in my little shredded dress and desecrated eyes. I don't shock him, but I'm not what he hoped for. He writes something in his pad.

Teenage Girl. Angst-Ridden. Badly Dyed Hair.

The cop, thirty or so, with a mustache and the dullest eyes, doesn't ask about Justine. He asks what time I expect my mother back.

"Is that relevant to the case?"

"Relevant? That's a big word for a little girl."

Suddenly, I'm nauseous. I'm reeling. I'm realizing all the things I don't have words for. The worldfor him a pad of dates, names, serial numbers, license plates. He'd need a soundtrack for his report, a rush of images: her legs alone, her legs kicking backwards, the slit of her skirt ripping as she ran, her legs like wishbones.

Some more notes in his pad now; I imagine them.

Single-Parent Family. Headed by Father. That Crazy Diehard Hippie.

And get this: the cop is checking me out. I thought the sight of me might disgust him, but I should have known. just because I'm soft-skinned and sixteen, they get this sick, weak look. Speed kicking in, not making me mellow, lazy, hazy, and high. Making me violent and blue, restless and aware of all the things I've got to do. All the things I've got to do.

"Touch my forehead," I tell him.

He does this, with little hesitation.

"You're hot."

"Yeah, I seem to be coming down with a bit of a fever."

"Maybe you should lie down and we can talk in your room."

"This whole thing has been very disturbing for me."

"I'm sure it has been," he says. "Disturbing, that's a good word."

He stands up. Moves toward me.

"I have a fever," I tell him. "You'd better stay away."

I head for my bedroom, and hear him walking away past the marijuana plants that line my father's shelves.

He's left my house and gone to jerk off, I bet. Jerk off in the front seat of his cruiser. I'm in my bedroom and he's imagining me here. A little girlyworld of Maybelline and heartthrobs Scotch-taped above pink pillows. Really, it's a bare room of white walls and Justine's books and skirts scattered all over the floor.

I try to sleep, but sleep's not easy when you're on speed. I guess the cop never left because now he's knocking on my door. I ask him to leave; I tell him I'm too hot to talk. Fuck. He says we must, but I won't. Just laughing at the thought of him banging down the bedroom door of a teenage girl. He imagines it pink and soft. He has no idea.

In The Bushes With The Burnout Boys

I guess all this shit started when I was in the bush. I loved the bush. Behind our school, it was like some tangled, rising creature, hands reaching skyward; a thousand savage, skinny fingers. Evergreens and Scotch pines twisting with blackberry bushes and dead oaks. Mornings before school, I used to head into it with my stupid Swiss Army knife. Hack and chop a path leading into a clearing. And at lunch hour, I'd bring the burnout boys in.

I'm not making this up: the burnout boys all had one-syllable names: Bryce, Bruce, Dean, and Dale. They were only a bit wayward, but they thought they were real rebels. Bragging as they brought out their plastic baggies of mushrooms and weed.

May: the bush was rainsoaked; we were whacked around as we went in. I lifted branches back, holding them so the burnouts could enter. We sat on the ground, in a dry place, hidden from the concrete slab of our school. Here, the mountains faded from view. The blue sky went white.

It began to rain again, the pale, common May rain. I sat down on the dirt, lay back with my hair on a broad, mossy rock. The air smelled great at this moment -- it smelled like rot and rain and Christmas.

Bryce drove his red pickup truck to the bush and opened the front door. Twelve o'clock: the Power Hour. Burnouts loved the Power Hour. Heaven. For them. They know every word. They sang along, pretending guitars were in their hands. They sang the Lemon Song to me.

Squeeze me baby so the juice runs down my leg.

My father used to say his generation fucked up in a lot of ways, but at least they invented rock and roll...

The Torn Skirt. Copyright © by Rebecca Godfrey. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Reading Group Guide

I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years.... And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me.

Introduction

Two weeks can change a person's life forever, especially in the case of 16-year-old Sara. Born with a mysterious fever, Sara's life has never matched her picturesque hometown of Victoria, BC's postcard-perfect reputation.

Deserted long ago by her rebellious heiress mother, Sara has somehow managed to piece together a life with her sensitive, pot-smoking father. Unable to cope with his teenage daughter's coming of age, Seamus drives off into the woods, abandoning Sara to fend for herself. Desperate for guidance, for a role model, for a little bit of excitement, Sara has a fleeting encounter with a mysterious girl -- Justine, a teenage runaway in the torn skirt -- who holds for Sara the promise of beauty, connection, danger. Her search for Justine -- which is, in essence, her search for herself -- takes her into the dark, but tempting underbelly of violence, drugs, prostitution, and even murder. The Torn Skirt leaves you hoping and aching for a sign that this unusually perceptive young woman will emerge unscathed, all the way to the final page.

The precision, clarity, lyricism (and wit) of Rebecca Godfrey's prose have created, in Sara, a piercing and unforgettable heroine -- and gives voice to the profound and universal experience of teenage isolation.

Discussion Questions

Sara's fever suddenly appears after lying dormant for 10 years. What factorsseem to trigger the onset of her fever? What does the fever represent? Did you feel the fever was psychosomatic or real? Is her fever a "symptom" or a "disease"?

Sixteen is a particularly soul-searching age for teenage girls, and Sara's search for Justine is, in essence, a search for herself. Why does Sara find Justine so fascinating as opposed to the other "Farah Fawcett-haired" island girls in her high school?

The girls Sara befriends and finds the most intriguing are all similar in that they are also desperate to leave their little isolated island. Alice (aka: China, Tahiti, and Bali), the teenage prostitute with an aptitude for drawing maps from memory, longs to escape to Penticton. Justine's dream is to travel to Greece to find her father. And Ivy Mercer, whom Sara wishes had been her friend, is off to college in New England. What are all the girls running from, and what are they really hoping to find in their travels?

In the end, Sara turns into Justine and in many ways emulates her -- a teenage runaway wanted by the law, all the way down to the final image of Sara running down the road in her torn skirt. Did you feel this is the life Sara really hoped to find? Did the ending suggest to you that Justine may have been just as innocent as Sara at one time, before becoming hardened by life on the streets?

When Sara discovers that Heather had been gang raped by the stoner boys, Sara feels somehow responsible. When Heather is then institutionalized, Sara shows up at the Ledger Hotel to visit her, as if they were close friends. What prompts Sara's sudden obsession with Heather's misfortunes?

The color red plays a significant role in the book: Sara's red hair; the forbidden Red Zone; and The Red Room at White Oak. Red usually represents "stop" or "danger." What does it symbolize in The Torn Skirt?

When Sara decides she will become a nurse, she sets out to teach herself everything there is to know about nursing, and even dresses in a nurse's uniform. The more Sara is drawn deeper into trouble, the more delusional she becomes about being a nurse. Is Sara really looking to heal others, or is she looking to heal herself? Or is she clinging so tenaciously to becoming a nurse because it's her last hope for living a normal life?

Sara was abandoned by her mother… and then her father. Justine lost her father, and her mother is never mentioned. China wonders if her mother is still alive. "Teenage runaway" seems like a misnomer once you realize that the girls didn't choose to become separated from their families. How do China, Justine, Sara, and the other street girls forge their own family?

Sara states her personal dislike for drug use early on in the book. However, after one day in the Forbidden Zone, she's suddenly doing drugs. Is Sara's reckless drug abuse similar to the self-mutilation act of Cassie and Amber carving FTW into their own flesh with a razor blade?

Seamus feels too much and Sara, the "Ice Queen," seems to feel too little. Does Sara intentionally set out to protect herself from the feelings that destroyed her father? How successful is she in suppressing her emotions?

Love's Baby Soft is such a young girl's perfume. Heavy metal music is also typically associated with younger audiences. In what other ways does the author depict the immaturity of the characters, using images often in conflict with their mature situations? About the Author: Rebecca Godfrey was born in Canada but lives in New York City. She has written for Detour, Index, and other magazines. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence. This is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

I loved and believed that narrative of a 16 year old mind—immature, abandoned and yet exploding. It came from a heartfelt and true perception, an authentic writers’ desire. Which made it rock.” — Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth

“The Torn Skirt is a hot book, a thrilling romance of teen rage and longing — like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, except about girls.” — Mary Gaitskill, author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“The Torn Skirt inspired a range of rabid fans, from literary hipsters to renegade kids.” — Rolling Stone

“A serious bullet of a book....Godfrey constantly impresses with her precise eye and impassioned tone. A bright new voice.” — Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“No one understands the teenage mind like Rebecca Godfrey. An no one can penetrate its darkest recesses with such insight and compassion.” — Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Captivating . . . Stark and bewitching . . . A voice that is fresh, disaffected and angst-ridden . . . Sara is afflicted with an overwhelming sense of compassion . . . Her world is a persuasive one, as malignant and addictive as a cigarette.” — New York Times Book Review

“A dizzying mix of hope and despair.” — Oregonian

“A wild, edgy ride...The Torn Skirt has enough drugs, parties, punks and criminal behavior to convince most mothers that locking their little darling in the upstairs bedroom is the safest way to go.” — Victoria Times-Colonist (Canada)

“[The] voice of the bad girls...[a] literary rebellion.” — Maclean's

“Unexpected, sharp as broken glass. She nails the dichotomy of teen fury and shoulder-shrugging apathy. A daunting debut that deserves notice...damn near pitch -perfect.” — Calgary Sun (Canada)

From the Publisher

Unexpected, sharp as broken glass. She nails the dichotomy of teen fury and shoulder-shrugging apathy. A daunting debut that deserves notice...damn near pitch -perfect.

Calgary Sun (Canada)

No one understands the teenage mind like Rebecca Godfrey. An no one can penetrate its darkest recesses with such insight and compassion.

Gary Shteyngart

Captivating . . . Stark and bewitching . . . A voice that is fresh, disaffected and angst-ridden . . . Sara is afflicted with an overwhelming sense of compassion . . . Her world is a persuasive one, as malignant and addictive as a cigarette.

New York Times Book Review

The Torn Skirt inspired a range of rabid fans, from literary hipsters to renegade kids.

Rolling Stone

A wild, edgy ride...The Torn Skirt has enough drugs, parties, punks and criminal behavior to convince most mothers that locking their little darling in the upstairs bedroom is the safest way to go.

Victoria Times-Colonist (Canada)

[The] voice of the bad girls...[a] literary rebellion.

Maclean's

A dizzying mix of hope and despair.

Oregonian

The Torn Skirt is a hot book, a thrilling romance of teen rage and longing — like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, except about girls.

Mary Gaitskill

I loved and believed that narrative of a 16 year old mind—immature, abandoned and yet exploding. It came from a heartfelt and true perception, an authentic writers’ desire. Which made it rock.

Thurston Moore

A dizzying mix of hope and despair.

Oregonian

Required reading.

New York Post

When Sara's hippie father catches her masturbating after school, he can't handle what he's witnessed. In one of this whip-smart debut's many surreal scenes, he decides to move out effective immediately. Godfrey's novel is full of equally disconcerting episodes, but its brash honesty gives them a giddily delightful spin. The departure of 16-year-old Sara's single father leaves her to fend for herself, and she quickly heads down the wrong path in mid-'80s Victoria, British Columbia. An obsession with Justine, a strangely alluring street girl, leads her into the red-light district, where she meets China, a teenage prostitute who persuades Sara to help her rob a john. As the new friends flee the crime scene, the deceived man threatens Sara, vowing to get revenge. Sure enough, just as she finally finds Justine again, she is accosted by the man, and Justine nearly kills him with a knife belonging to Sara. Though the book is a hell-ride through the lives of burned-out teens killing time in homeless shelters and drug houses, the scenery is transformed by Godfrey's angry cleverness: one character is "like the rising rowdy moment of a party just before the cops arrive and send everyone home." Though secondary figures like Sara's father and China don't get the thorough treatment Godfrey gives Sara, Godfrey's singular voice is a perfect barometer of teenage rage and insecurity. (Oct. 15) Forecast: A great cover shot of a girl in a short skirt with a bruised knee gets exactly the right message across. This is a potential teen cult hit and should do particularly well on the West Coast, where Godfrey will tour. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In this gritty, bittersweet first novel, 16-year-old narrator Sara is a small pebble in the storm-tossed sea of her adolescence. Raised on a hippie commune, she is left to her own devices when her father quits for the woods to lead a simpler life (her mother stays behind at the commune). Shortly after his departure, the fever that enveloped Sara at birth returns with a vengeance, and she begins her search for refuge, beauty, and a level of honesty. Although she finds relative comfort with the "burnout boys," classmates who smoke marijuana in the fields behind the high school, she's not satisfied. Her curiosity propels her to venture into Victoria, British Columbia's enticing mid-1980s underworld, where she meets a group of colorful, worldly, and energetic adolescents in alleys, strange rooms, and diners. One of them is the torn skirt-wearing Justine, who mesmerizes Sara. Even though Justine slips in and out of Sara's periphery, Sara continues to look for her, thinking of her as an alter ego. As she resists boredom and conformity, Sara acquires self-confidence, a few rough edges, and her own distinctive voice. Godfrey's style is simple, believable, and pared to the bone. At a moderate price, this debut is highly recommended for medium-sized and larger public libraries.-Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. P.L., Harrisburg, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Adult/High School-As a teen in the mid-'80s in British Columbia, Sara Shaw has two lives. At home, she is the responsible daughter who cleans, launders, and manages the bills for her feckless, addicted father. At school, aptly nicknamed "Mount Drug," she hangs out with a group of stoned delinquents. When her father suddenly abandons her, she leaves home for the back alleys of Victoria where she is swept into the world of runaways, pimps, prostitutes, and addicts. Despite the graphic sexual situations and language, this is a touching book about a sensitive, articulate teen who longs for security while recklessly courting danger. She misses her mother who still lives in the commune Sara and her father had left. She regrets not befriending a girl at her school, and tries to compensate by helping the young women she meets on the streets and in a shelter. She imagines life with the kind foster family she is offered, but can't make herself leave the streets and go to them. This first novel is suspenseful, surprisingly funny, and thought provoking. Godfrey's portrayal of the anguish and hope of troubled teens has a searing authenticity.-Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Teenage angst gets a surprisingly honest and effective rendering from a bright new voice.

Born with a raging fever and raised in a frightening, Manson-esque (without the murder) commune on the West Coast, Sara Shaw is a girl just trying to make it through her small-town high school. Her father’s a decent sort, benign and useless in a hippie sort of way, and at least he leaves her alone. Sara hangs with the burnout guys at school but doesn’t feel exactly fulfilled by their established rebellion, knowing that no matter how much Led Zeppelin they listen to or dope they smoke, none of them has any ambitions beyond their town. Sara becomes inexplicably obsessed with Justine, a furiously antisocial girl in the torn skirt of the title, and after randomly spotting and tailing her, gets caught up with a floating world of hookers and junkies who inhabit the town’s so-called "Red Zone." At this vulnerable stage, her father decides to take off for the woods as part of his quest to lead a simpler life, and Sara’s slide into FTW ("Fuck the World") behavior accelerates. School attendance quickly becomes a thing of the past, and before she knows it, she’s rooming with junkies and becoming fodder for cautionary tales. Launching into her narrative—"those twelve days when there was too much rain and I was burning and I found and lost Justine"—with seemingly no purpose, Godfrey offers few surprises in her story but constantly impresses with her precise eye and impassioned tone. This first-timer may not have opened new vistas of literature, but she brings this feverish girl fully to life on these rage-prone pages.

Giving witness yet again to the self-created drama of adolescence: a serious bullet of abook.

Kirkus Reviews