I’m usually a sucker for coming-of-age books, especially those about my fellow Generation X-ers. I was hoping Amanda Boyden’s novel Pretty Little Dirty would appease my love for these types of books. Sadly, this book was a huge disappointment.
Pretty Little Dirty started out promising. Lisa Smith and Celeste Diamond meet as grade schoolers in Kansas City, Missouri. Lisa has just moved from Chicago and Celeste has just moved from New York. Being the new girls in town, they bond immediately and become best friends.
Lisa, who narrates the books, has a bad home life. Her mother is still in the throes of post-partum depression at a time mental illness was barely understood and properly treated. And her father is totally checked out, not there to offer his children support and comfort.
On the other hand, Celeste’s family is picture perfect to young Lisa. Her parents are warm and funny. Lisa finds solace with the Diamond family so much she seems to spend more time with them than with her own family.
Lisa and Celeste bond at summer camp and their friendship continues once they get to high school. These two girls show promise. They take dance classes, get good grades, and sing in the school choir. They also start spending time at the Kansas City Art Institute meeting artsy types. And that’s when Pretty Little Dirty completely goes off the rails.
Lisa and Celeste get heavily into drugs and sleep with a lot of guys. Chapter after chapter is about these two girls ingesting illegal substances and having sex with loser guys. This continues when they go to college-Lisa to the University of Wisconsin and Celeste to Berkeley. It’s just a downward spiral of drugs, bad sex, and hanging out with really sketchy people. They also go to a lot of rock shows but they seem to be more into the scene than the actual music. I was wondering how they could afford their lifestyles. The only source of money these girls had were their parents’ credit cards and dealing drugs.
I’m not prude. Drug use and sex in a novel is not going to make me clutch my pearls. But I’m trying to figure out how two young women with such unrestrained drug use could even make a simple cup of coffee in the morning let alone get really good grades in high school and college. And by the early 1980s AIDS was a huge threat so banging random men without condoms is just so unbelievably stupid. Plus, the sex scenes are so soulless and off putting. And the writing of these sex scenes is gag-inducing, makes sex look so unsexy. And in one passage, Lisa talks about plucking crabs from her pubic hair in the bathroom stall of a club. Hmm, how classy.
Speaking of the writing, it’s repetitive, overwrought, and at times, quite dull. In the hands of a much better writer, Pretty Little Dirty could have been good, but it’s not. And when the book concluded with a tragic yet predictable end, I couldn’t have cared less.
In the end Lisa and Celeste aren’t likable and relatable. Sure, teen girls are going to experiment with drugs and sex, but they also have characteristics that make them compelling and interesting. No amount of sex, drugs, and rock and roll could make Lisa and Celeste compelling and interesting. They are vapid, self-absorbed, not very bright, and aren’t as artsy and bewitching as they think they are. They are also mean girls who make fun of other people’s looks and their racism is barely veiled. Pretty Little Dirty is ugly massive dirty waste of time.
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