Towelhead

At the movies last weekend, there was a preview for the film version of Towelhead. The preview made the movie seem smart and funny--it reminded me somewhat of Little Miss Sunshine--so I requested the book through the library system and happily got it within four days.

I finished the book in hours, but it made me so, so sad. Sure, it was funny in many places--mainly because the main character, Jasira, the first-person narrator, has absolutely no irony in how she perceives the world. But the book still made me so sad, because I could hardly bear the loneliness and lack of affection she seemed doomed to live with.

Jasira is half-Lebanese, half-Irish-American. At the age of 13, she has become so physically precocious that her mother's boyfriend has a crush on her, so that her mother sends her to her father in Houston. Jasira dreads the new situation, based on her one-month-a-year visits with her father who has rules he shares with her only after she's broken them, and uses his hands freely on her and doesn't give her the assurance and affection an awkward adolescent needs.

Jasira keeps trying find someone to love her, make her feel special and safe. With pretty disastrous consequences. Luckily, she finds a new family of sorts in another set of neighbors, Gil & Melina. They provide a safe haven for her when her father threatens a serious beating, after he finds a Playboy magazine in her room. They also give her the courage to confront her molester.

What made me so sad was how alone she was, how she developed all these false emotions because no one loved her enough to say to her "This is love, that is not" or "This is real, that isn't". How confused she was by her own body, and out of her lack of knowledge and people to trust in, she decides to listen to her body, to do what made her body feel good, because "anything that could give me an orgasm was good."

It also made me sad to think of my children's bodies changing, when they become adolescents. Would they come to us with their questions and confusion? Would their friends be reliable sources for information? Will we have a good enough relationship that they could feel secure in asking us anything about sex and sexuality?