My Girl: Adventures with a Teen in Training

by Karen Stabiner

Overview

Here's a radical concept: Most girls are happy, and so are their mothers. Most girls are not destined for depression, eating disorders, low self-esteem, and raging fights with their parents--that's just a very noisy minority. In My Girl, Karen Stabiner tells the story of one girl's journey into adolescence, and of her own efforts to find a way to guide her daughter through life's real thickets--not the scary but rare ones we hear so much about. When Sarah reached sixth grade, horror stories about the coming teenage years began drifting her parents' way. The media reinforced the idea of mothers and daughters as adversaries, and the fashion industry promoted styles that fairly guaranteed a battle. But as Stabiner approached that supposedly stormy time, she found something quite different. The world was full of daughters who were sick of being told how wretched they were and mothers who found that the passage to adolescence was both exciting and enjoyable--despite the inevitable conflicts. Even the happiest adolescence is full of challenges, though, and Karen Stabiner has gathered a lifesaving breadth of expert instruction ("Even when it's difficult, the onus is on the mother to be an adult"), enlightenment ("Ninety-seven percent of girls do not have a diagnosable eating disorder"), and support (conflict is "an incredible compliment to a mother," the safe person in her daughter's life). Sarah grows from a child who still likes to be carried to bed occasionally into a teen mastering a demanding sport and navigating friendships, and Karen Stabiner tells the story of that transition in scenes that will be both familiar and instructive to all mothers. Along the way, she learns to let go a little and to adjust the balance of her own life. With warmth, humor, and sharp insight, My Girl charts those first years of adolescence--and engagingly debunks the prevailing assumption that they are inevitably miserable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316608527
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/14/2005
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Karen Stabiner is a journalist who writes about food, health, and family issues. Some of her previous books include Family Table, a two-year collaboration with James Beard award-winning Michael Romano; the novel Getting In, a comic look at the college admissions sweepstakes; My Girl: Adventures with a Teen in Training, a finalist for the Books for a Better Life Award; and All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters.

She is a regular contributor to The Los Angeles Times' Opinion section, and her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Los Angeles Magazine, and The New Yorker. She lives in New York City with her family.

What People are Saying About This

Wendy Wasserstein

"Any mother who is terrified of the early onset of adolescence and is convinced her darling girl will turn into a terrifying alien with a pierced midriff will be reassured and even delighted by this book. My Girl is both charming and heartfelt. And, for once, it seems that a parent is being honest about adolescence."

Carolyn See

"Okay, I admit freely that I am Karen Stabiner's devoted friend and one of Sarah Dietz's greatest fans, but as a mother who loves and admires her own daughters with great and terrible love and admiration, I applaud My Girl with all my heart-for its eloquent argument that mothers and daughters don't have to fight and, indeed, may love one another as long as they all may live."
—author of Making a Literary Life

Arianna Huffington

"Karen Stabiner shatters the Mean Girls myth! Although raising an adolescent is always a challenge, My Girl shows, with insight and heart, that the hardships have been greatly exaggerated -- especially when it comes to moms and their daughters. Strong, independent, and loving girls are the rule, not the exception, as Stabiner's experience so engagingly reveals."

Jamie Lee Curtis

"My Girl is a wonderful girl-guide-a gentle road map through the State of Adolescence."

Peggy Orenstein

"We have read about the difficulties girls can face; now it's time to talk about the solutions. My Girl is exactly the book we need-the tale of how one mother helps her daughter navigate her tween years with a powerful sense of who she is, what she can do, and what her relationships ought to be like. Karen Stabiner writes her story with crackerjack timing, and not just for the funny stuff, but for that single sentence that pierces the heart in ways that are unexpected, poignant, ironic, and wise."
—author of School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap

Editorial Reviews

This work asks the question, "Is the miserable, angry adolescent girl depicted by the media true?" At the outset, Stabiner, a journalist who has enjoyed a close relationship with her young daughter, Sarah, faces the impending teen years with trepidation given all the horror stories propagated by books like Abigail Vona's Bad Girl. However, as her daughter matures from age ten to 14, Stabiner comes to believe that those stories do most adolescent girls a great injustice. Aside from some relatively minor friction, which inevitably accompanies all change, the author concludes that most girls are fairly happy and well adjusted-or they would be if society would give them a break. A refreshing, although somewhat inconclusive, perspective based on research and interviews; for teen psychology collections. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

An optimistic examination of girlhood in contemporary America. Journalist Stabiner (All Girls, 2002, etc.) was utterly in love with her daughter Sarah. And Sarah was utterly in love back. Then, as Sarah approached her "tween" years, mom and daughter alike began to hear scary prognostications. Sarah would turn into a queen-bee, or a wanna-be, or an Ophelia. She'd get anorexia, start snorting coke, and hate her parents. This is what Stabiner's friends, and the available parenting-a-tween-or-teen-girl books, predicted. But the author felt that the tween years couldn't really be that bleak. So she began to take notes about her relationship with her daughter. In her seventh outing, Stabiner insists that the pundits are giving girls a bad rap. She presents a different model, of a mom and a tween who seem to be doing just fine, thank you, and, meanwhile, offers wisdom on topics ranging from cliques to hairdos. But her greatest strength is her way with the language. The descriptions are lyrical and sensuous: "Over the summer they had acquired blond highlights, hairstyles that required not just a blow-dryer but the dexterous use of a round brush . . . and they wore low-rise capri pants on their incipient hips." While Stabiner claims to chronicle Sarah from 10 to 14, the focus is her sixth-grade year; seventh grade gets a few chapters, eight and ninth a few pages. Had more been devoted to the later tween years, the obvious criticism that of course Sarah was still good and happy might have been avoided: she was only in sixth grade, after all, still practically a baby. The real test will come in an imagined sequel. How will this mom and daughter duo fare during real adolescence? Another frustratingflaw is Stabiner's unthinking portrait of her considerable affluence. She seems not to realize readers may blink at her descriptions of Sarah's posh private school, or stumble over the chapter that begins "We had to buy a horse."Still, despite its limitations, a funny and very smart read.

Kirkus Reviews