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Erika Schickel

The Big Hurt: A Memoir Kindle Edition

by Erika Schickel (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

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''I was transported and consumed by Schickel's hypnotic unspooling of her troubled, sexed-up adolescence and the way the legacy of that time followed her like a black dog into midlife. Beautifully written, intensely relatable, and fueled by incendiary fury and love.'' --Claire Dederer, author of Love and Trouble

''Takes the vagaries and vicissitudes of the human heart and elevates them to the level of social, even political, inquiry. Erika Schickel is not just an interrogator of her own psyche but an interpreter of the times -- the current era as well as the decades that led us here.'' --Meghan Daum, author of The Problem with Everything --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

About the Author

Erika Schickel is the author of You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, Bust magazine, Salon, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and more.

--This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Product details

Language ‏ : ‎ English
File Size ‏ : ‎ 618 KB
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 10, 2021
Date First Available ‏ : ‎ January 1, 1970
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hachette Books
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08PV3S5WC

Best Sellers Rank: #872,470 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #387 in Parenting Teenagers (Kindle Store)
- #1,402 in Parenting Girls
- #3,941 in Biographies & Memoirs of Women

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4.5 99 ratings

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Erika Schickel

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Erika Schickel’s vivid, brainy yet vulnerable, often hilariously heartfelt writing deftly exposes the well-known, yet often overlooked taboo subjects of women’s lives. Whether she’s divulging the boredom of mothering small children, exploring the breakthroughs of psychedelics, or exposing predatory boarding school teachers, she does so with heart, honesty, and humor.

She is the author of The Big Hurt (Hachette Books, 2021) and You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (Kensington Books, 2007). She has taught memoir and essay writing at UCLA and privately. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, LA City Beat, Salon, Ravishly, Tin House, Bust Magazine, and The LA Review of Books, among others.

She is also a trained actress, performing on-camera as well as off. In addition, she’s written and performed a number of one-woman shows and a radio play for the LA Theatre Works series: The Play’s the Thing. Erika lives outside of Los Angeles, CA.

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Anna

READ IT

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2023

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This book is a beautiful, smart, funny, thoughtful page-turner that had me angry as hell by the end of it. It moved me and inspired me and kept me parked in one seat on my couch for a few nights straight. I'm guessing you'll fall in love with the author's voice and insights like I did. It's also just a psychologically interesting topic/story. READ IT.

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carilynp

Perceptive, raw, honest. A well-told and fascinating memoir.

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2021

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As a young girl, the author felt the divide of her parent’s devastating divorce and subsequent wildly complex relationships, which led to feeling like she never fit in, always searching for someone to belong to, to promising herself that she would not repeat her mother and father’s patterns, and ultimately making the same mistakes.

Erika comes from a family of writers. It was natural that she would follow a similar path. She was enamored with her father, well-known movie critic Richard Schickel, and novelist Julia Whedon. While she maintained a close relationship with her father, there was something a bit amiss. Her mother remained aloof, not providing the stability a young girl needs. When trouble arose, Erika was shipped off to boarding school. Sadly, school administrators could not fill the missing parental role.

Left to her own devices and without a consistent home to visit on breaks, Erika felt even more alone, leaving her vulnerable and prey to being taken advantage of. And that she was.

This is a pattern that would be repeated later in her life, when she was again susceptible, not knowing that she had been a victim of abuse in her teens.

From an elite Manhattan school to a secluded east coast boarding school, Schickel is made a victim of boys and men well before there was a name for the MeToo movement, then shamed for their actions rather than the other way around. The ramifications of abuse and dishonor follow her into adulthood when she succumbs to a man whose power exceeds her lack of self-worth.

Schickel’s candid ability to look back on her younger and more recent days, to analyze her marriage, infidelity, parenting, and relationship with her parents is insightful, deep, and not without self-critique. She has a lot of guts in putting herself out there with this book – laying herself bare, not shying away from her mistakes.

THE BIG HURT is a powerful look at a woman who owns her misfortunes, who is not merely the victim but also recognizes the trauma she endured, while summing it up sans sugar-coating.

5 people found this helpful

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Ruuf W

A beautiful gut punch

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2021

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I have just finished The Big Hurt and started reading it again immediately, partly because I wasn't ready to have Erika Schickel's voice out of my head so soon, and partly because I gobbled it up on the first go and wanted to catch the details that now have more significance after finishing her story. I loved it. The writing is as beautiful as her experiences are sad. I feel like a really good memoir lets the reader walk in the author's shoes and understand them better. A really great one helps you understand yourself better. The best helps you understand human nature better. I think The Big Hurt does just that. Schickel's insights from her own introspection and research give the readers high-level perspective on the worst "family of origin" legacies. Our parents, being a product of their own parents' generation, could only go so far emotionally and behaviorally. Throw abuse and trauma into the mix, in Schickel's case, and it created a real soup for the next generation. Despite her parents' mistreatment, she clearly embodies the best of them – rapier wit, vivid perception of her surroundings, incredible synthesis of the whole – which she owns in her writing. I'm very sorry Schickel's arc was built of such miserable stuff. But her punch out the back side of it is inspirational.
We all deserve to be loved and love, healthily, be happy, be fulfilled with our life, and share ourselves wholly. I breathed a sigh of relief for her evolution as I read.

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Constance Ford

Funny, painful, beautifully written memoir

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2021

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I devoured this book - the prose is beautiful and the story is gripping - and I’m moved to see how clearly Schickel writes about intergenerational trauma. This is important all on its own, but l see a bigger picture in this book as well, about repeated cycles of behavior and trauma in society at large - in institutions - within petrified, patriarchal gender roles - and not least, in the way women have often been asked to subjugate themselves to the “genius of the male artist.” I was particularly moved by this moment that comes toward the end of the book: "...and that is how I found myself driving my daughter to boarding school, once more astonished by how meticulously my past was repeating itself."

But there’s also a determination to not let the story end there. Eventually the narrator dedicates herself to "the task of diving into the wreck," the hard work that humans must do if we want things to change, in our own lives and in society as a whole. Altogether, I highly recommend this book! It's a great read - there’s pain here and humor and love, and the power of one woman speaking the truth of her life.

One person found this helpful

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James H. Conley

A Big Book

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2021

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The Big Hurt is a big book and a must-read. Erika Schickel's voice is immediate and sometimes sardonic, while remaining compassionate and precise. Once you begin this book, you will find it hard to put it down, so compelling are the woven narratives it contains. Accomplished, artistic men accumulate a lot of currency in society. Schickel shows us that they also often leave considerable emotional harm in their wakes.

When I finished The Big Hurt, I wanted to start over again right away. Rarely do memoirs seem so brave, or so necessary. Schickel measures the patterns of her life choices as well as the consequences that those choices have brought to her and to her loved ones. She has achieved a real feat of reckoning and memory here, crafted with a profound literary skill. Buy it and read it to share her journey.

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Heidi G. Croot

Erika Schickel holds back nothing

Reviewed in Canada on February 6, 2022

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So much about this shining, harrowing tale to admire and shrink from. Erika Schickel lets us see everything.

And if certain readers have a problem with that, she has a message for you, and it’s on the front cover.

The message for everyone else is built into the book title.

What I recognized as a reader?

That careless parenting opens portals to all kinds of addiction. That a surfeit of predators waits on the other side. That empathy can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

What I noticed as a writer?

Her raw, magnetic, unvarnished voice, as if she’s confiding in a Lidia Yuknavitch who would never judge. Her suspenseful weaving of past and present. Her ability to offset depths with heights. Her luminous language.

I kept my seat through the first chapter and by the end stepped out of the ride sad, angry, euphoric, hopeful, wiser. This story shifted my world view for worse and by far for better.

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