# The Big Hurt: A Memoir - Hardcover

by **Erika Schickel** (Author)

**This complex memoir shows what it was like growing up in the shadow of a literary father and a neglectful mother, getting thrown out of boarding school after being seduced by a teacher, and all of the later-life consequences that ensue.**

In 1982, Erika Schickel was expelled from her East Coast prep school for sleeping with a teacher. She was _that_ girl--rebellious, precocious, and macking for love. Seduced, caught, and then whisked away in the night to avoid scandal, Schickel's provocative, searing, and darkly funny memoir, _The Big Hurt_, explores the question, _How did that girl turn out?_

Schickel came of age in the 1970s, the progeny of two writers: Richard Schickel, the prominent film critic for _TIME_ magazine, and Julia Whedon, a melancholy mid-list novelist. In the wake of her parents' ugly divorce, Erika was packed off to a bohemian boarding school in the Berkshires.

_The Big Hurt_ tells two coming-of-age stories: one of a lost girl in a predatory world, and the other of that girl grown up, who in reckoning with her past ends up recreating it with a notorious LA crime novelist, blowing up her marriage and casting herself into the second exile of her life.

_The Big Hurt_ looks at a legacy of shame handed down through a maternal bloodline and the cost of epigenetic trauma. It shines a light on the _haute_ culture of 1970s Manhattan that made girls grow up too fast. It looks at the long shadow cast by great, monstrously self-absorbed literary lives and the ways in which women pin themselves like beautiful butterflies to the spreading board of male ego.

### Author Biography

**Erika Schickel is** the author of _You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom_ (2007). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the _Los Angeles Times_, _The Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly,_ Bust Magazine, Salon, The Daily Beast, HuffPost, _The Chicago Tribune_ and more. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

**Number of Pages:** 352

**Dimensions:** 1.5 x 9.1 x 6.2 IN

**Publication Date:** August 10, 2021

## Details

- **Price:** 28.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 28.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- The Big Hurt: A Memoir - Hardcover

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