Not that kind of Girl: Carlene Bauer’s story of New York, conversion, and doubt.

[Synnical]

http://www.patrolmag.com/arts/1813/our-kind-of-girl

GROWING UP steeped in evangelicalism in the New Jersey suburbs, Carlene Bauer knew all about cognitive dissonance. Uncomfortable with emotional suspicion of the churches she grew up in, she prayed that she might someday find one that “didn't mind if you wanted to enjoy life in a big city rather than drag its inhabitants toward repentance,” as she wrote in Salon earlier this summer. She took the leap into New York after college, without money or connections, and began trying to make her name on the city’s inbred literary scene. As she carved out a living working in publishing and writing for Salon, Elle, the New York Observer, and the New York Times Magazine, she struggled to hold together the disparate lives of a New York intellectual and a struggling believer.

. . .

For the majority of her memoir Bauer is, quite literally, that second-guessing wise virgin. Growing up she was the kind of girl who, though drawn to the Smiths, U2, REM, Nirvana, censored herself, drew her own lines as to what was acceptable and what was not. “My sister and I had a ‘this far and no further,’ which was Nine Inch Nails.” she tells me over iced coffees at a bakery in Manhattan. “There was something about it that seemed more real in its darkness … I did a lot of censoring.”

. . .

Her decision to walk away from the faith she had been raised in, though perhaps brewing under the surface throughout her life, arrives in the book simultaneous to and just as suddenly as the world changed on September 11, 2001. Sensitive to the ways 9/11 has been used as a signifier for a wide variety of things in the eight short years since it occurred, Bauer handled this portion of her memoir with much delicacy. “I thought to myself, ‘God, September 11th? I’m going to do that,’ she admits. “But that’s what happened. But I was very careful to not get hysterical, because I didn’t feel that way.”

“I guess I had enough pretending that anything was caring about me,” she tells me, not smiling for the first time in our two-hour conversation. “I didn’t want to think about anything that may or may not exist.” She attempted to return to church a few times after feeling like it was over, but a combination of the Catholic church’s priest scandal which broke in the following months and the emergence of Evangelicals as a far-right political force served to further affirm her choice.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060840544?ie=UTF8&tag=patromagaz-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060840544

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeously written, a stunner of a memoir, August 7, 2009
By Anastasia Duro (Queens, NY) - See all my reviews
I love memoirs, especially ones about addiction, my motto being, "the more debauched the better." But Carlene Bauer has written quite a different sort of memoir. Her story is of a good girl who is both equally baffled by and attracted to the misbehaviors of her peers. Not one to go unreflectively forth, Bauer ponders her way through to her 30's. Luckily for us, all of her introspection is written in precise and evocative prose, laced with humor, wit, self-deprecation and honest admissions of pain and humiliation. If you have a functioning brain, if you think about your place in the world, if you've ever felt awkward, disappointed by reality, or wanted more than what made the rest of the people around you happy-you will love this book.


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Emotional, August 6, 2009
By Shawn - See all my reviews
To say Carlene Bauer is an amazing, lyrical writer is simply an understatement. She weaves a deeply personal story with the utmost of grace, giving readers unlimited access to her mind and heart. But she shows no signs of vulnerability as she opens that door. There is no lack of accessibility in her story, even for men. Her personal struggles, conflicts, and temptations are obstacles we all encounter but few of us are able to admit, especially in such a public forum. If you learn one thing from this memoir it should be that in life, patience is never overrated.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51kSAIY9MpL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Edit: I think I want to read this book. I haven't read many "converted" books, as I'm not a "new atheist" nor a former fundy. I knew I was an atheist early in life. This book looks endearing. -Cindy