The author comes of age in a cohesive 1970s suburban New Haven family, complete with a martyred Catholic sense of suffering, duty and selfless obligtion. As adolescence approaches, Dobie's allegiance changes from mother to father. The "opposing narratives" of her parents' lives provide alternate paths. Her mother, raised as a single child of a divorced mother, speaks of the past with a "keening complaint" and focuses on the "interior" pains of "hurt feelings and unhapiness." Her intensely focused father depicts "life as filled with tests, danger...and adventure." Initially, Dobie's "dreaminess and forgetfulness" clash with her father's "Germanic...distaste for both disorder and vulnerability," but the author ultimately embraces her father's appetite for the "world's richness" and a "large life filled with drama."
Paradoxically, Dobie is fascinated by passivity and gradually learns to link it with sexuality. Both "unpredictable and sensual," passivity charges her with sexual energy, so intense that she "swooned with pleasure." After her older brother runs away from home, Dobie discovers a "bewildering colness" overtaking her sensibilities, and she realizes that her days as a "witness, a handmaiden with the coffeepot" were about to end. If her brother defined himself by physical removal, Dobie determines that sexuality will be her means of self-liberation.
At fourteen, the author's savors her realization that not only does her body have an impact on men, but their notice of her body inexplicably thrills her. Gradually, Dobie engages in mindless, unfulfilling intercourse -- an accepted rite of passage for young men but a terminally stigmatizing experience for young women. Her sexual experiences result in numbness, not freedom; confusion, not certainty. Her acts of rebellion estrange her from her family, friends and self. Her sexual partners -- boyfriends is far too intimate a designation -- satisfy their needs on and through her, but never "with" her. These young men have regular girlfriends with whom they would never act on their sexual impulses. In the Madonna-whore dichotomy, there is no question which role Dobie assumes. One young man even whispers "chinga" [Spanish for whore] into her ear during the sexual act. In a surreal transposition of secret keeping, the people who are close to her are frozen out of Katie's new sexual identity and the nameless blue-collar young men and women of her town excoriate her, brutally branding her as promiscuous trash.
Dazed and slowly comprehending that her "life will never be the same," Dobie watches the evaporation of her former identity, a sense that a younger self "was mine no longer." After the evening of her ultimate degradation, she asks rhetorially, "What kind of girl would let four boys do what those boys had done to me?" Yet, she refuses to accept her victimization (painfully and powerfully recreated in the memoir), determined grimly to "face the music."
Her reckoning and redemption begins in the act of truly befriending her sister Cindy, who is forced to wear a back brace to correct a spinal defect. Caring for Cindy teaches Dobie that not only does life go on, but that the world could become beautiful through acts of kindness, consideration and love. To the author's delight, life's unspoken beauty "would always be there, waiting."
As Kathy Dobie seeks to authenticate her experiences, to comprehend their significance, she must confront the perpetrators. Their indiffernce and menace convince her of the singularity of that night in the car and of her need to be "even more protective" of her memory, "more distrustful of other people's interpretations" of the assault. These memories, "guarded for years" must be stored away, only to be opened for self-evaluation years later. "The Only Girl in the Car" is the product of decades of sequestered memory and deliberate interpretation.
Memoirist Fern Schumer Chapman has written that identity is formed by self, family, place and past. Katie Dobie has used that formula and selected one defining moment to be the prism through which those four variables intersect. Her identity, formed around frequent uncomprehending sexual intercourse as an early adolescent, rotates around the painful understanding that angry, sexually-frustrated young men radiate hatred towards young women who explore sex. Ruefully, she concludes that these boys, soon to become men, will receive as much "pleasure to hurt a girl...as...to make love to her." Their cost is greater than hers. She will overcome; they will not.