Young Adult Writer
Kerry Cohen

May 25, 2008

The Show

"Loose Girl - A Memoir of Promiscuity"

I grew up in the suburbs of New York City in New Jersey. My mother was an eccentric artist and my father a genius engineer. I always had the sense that my family was strange, insulated and different from the families of my friends. While the rest of my family experienced the world visually, whether as artists or designers, I saw the world and my life as narrative.

In high school I kept a journal full of truly devastatingly bad love poems and complaints. My high school English teacher directed me toward novels and stories of women, and by reading of these women, their pain and confusion, their difficulties with loving and being loved, I understood I was not alone.

By college, I finally began to understand myself as a writer. I had a story to tell, I knew. I didn't yet know what it was, but I could feel it inside me waiting to be told. I attended an MFA program where I got my bearings as a writer, and ten years later I published my first book, Easy. Soon after I wrote Loose Girl, the story that had been waiting.