When Good Girls Do It: A Memoir

Want to start a fight in America? Voice your opinion on teen sex. Christian leaders, parents, and policy makers are obsessed with it. Many decide that, for the young and unmarried, abstinence is best. Of course, the young and unmarried don’t always agree. Most disregard the pleas for purity, threats of damnation, and warnings about STDs and simply do what feels right. Others, however, take these things to heart. Encouraged by their religious leaders, many teens make the pledge to wait until marriage. They praise their Lord, wear abstinence rings, and surround themselves with like-minded people to temper temptation. Then one day, they fantasize. The next week, they masturbate. And after a few years, they head off to college, break up with their high school sweethearts and have sex for the first time.

Then the real mind-fuck begins.

When Good Girls Do It tells my individual experience as a growing American statistic: an Evangelical teen who pledges sexual abstinence, has sex anyway, and is forced to reconsider the holy identity she thought she had. Guilty feelings, sexual bargaining and religious questioning drive my story and define the shared experience of millions of Christian Americans. Written in a cohesive collection of lyrical prose vignettes, this memoir captures the tension between Evangelical dogma and individual desire without taking refuge in clichés.