Turning me over

Last week, I finished Jeff Sharlet's expose on radical fundamentalists influence on politics in America. I have moved on to Carlene Bauer's "Not That Kind of Girl", which is a memoir about how she freed herself from her fundamentalist Christian upbringing. I first read about this book in Time Out. Reading the praise for her first book, I felt a lump in my throat. Carlene has beat me to it, I thought.

Going from Sharlet to Bauer is like going from the Library on Fifth to a bedroom in content and tone. It is so much harder to read Ms. Bauer's book without constantly comparing her experience to my own. Sharlet's book was about discovering a secret world I know very little about, but I know what it is like to grow up born-again. I know how I came the decision to leave the fold and yoke myself unevenly with the world and lost souls.

I'm at the part where Carlene is in love with a brilliant student, Joshua, who was kicked out of the ivy league and ended up at her catholic college in Baltimore. She writes this about how he makes her feel:

Someone had demanded to meet me, and now was demanding to know what I thought about every last thing. Someone was looking at me, taking me in, turning me over in his palm, wondering where to put me. In diners, in cafes, in his minivan, in my room, in his room, on streets under heavy clouds.

On break, she took a job as a waitress to subjugate self to the customer. Carlene decides, while on hands and knees picking french fries from the carpeting underneath the booths after her shift, that she can no longer just be friends with Joshua and endeavors never to speak to him again. Joshua was forcing her to listen to herself, her desires. So, Carlene clarified what she wanted from her relationship with Joshua - while crawling on hands and knees in polyester, as she put it, "mortifying the flesh."