Bawdy and brutal, sweet and sad, this is a memoir of growing up Portuguese Catholic in America, the product of a belt-wielding father and a mother who really did believe that good Catholic girls don’t use tampons — and this not in the 1950s but in the 1980s.

Here are grannies who start a feud so bitter they divide a community; a neighborhood where “the people who were the most uptight Catholics always had the best smut”; church clothes that are hung outside in the fresh air because it’s cheaper than dry cleaning; and above all the sorrow of life with an abusive father. Simas’s memories are striking for their raw emotive power, and they leave the reader rooting for her to succeed, as indeed she does when she first stands up to her father at the age of seventeen.

The book had me alternately holding my breath in horror and laughing out loud. Despite the fear and the shame of her upbringing, Simas manages to find dark humor in the ironies of the adults around her. She ends on an optimistic note: “Don’t regret your choices . . . don’t despair. . . . Just put one foot in front of the other, and you’ll do just fine.”

Marie Simas. Do Tampons Take Your Virginity? A Catholic Girl’s Memoir. CreateSpace, 2010. Paperback. 161 pages. ISBN 9781453799758.

From my blog at http://true-small-caps.blogspot.com

Thanks for this review and all the others you've posted, Derek. You've alerted us to some very interesting reads.

Peace, Phil

You're welcome. No doubt everyone has their own tastes, which will vary from my own, but hopefully you'll find something to interest you in among what I've been reading. Kind of like visiting someone's house and browsing their bookshelves.