Where the Girls Were
Feminist writer Schatz knocks it out of the park with her debut novel about a young woman in late ´60s California who—like so many from her generation—gets trapped between the contrasting values of American counterculture and a society that denies her agency over her own body and choices.
The soon-to-be valedictorian at her high school, Elizabeth Baker Phillips is her parents’ pride, the natural culmination of her studiousness and a loving upbringing overlaid with high expectations. Then her path to Stanford is wrecked after she gets caught up the blissful freedom at her cousin May’s party at San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and has a short affair with an attractive hippie. Suddenly Baker, a “good girl” who’d barely touched a man before, finds herself pregnant and lost, a situation presented with deep understanding. Desperate to conceal their family’s shame, Baker’s mother, Rose, drops her off, without her prior knowledge, at a home for unwed mothers. Here, Baker and others are meant to spend months behind locked doors and pressured to sign their babies away for adoption; after going into labor, they’re whisked off and never mentioned again. She gets curious about all the girls made to disappear and ponders what to do next.
The camaraderie amongst the girls is suffused with warmth. Each situation is unique, but they all recognize the unfairness: they’re effectively imprisoned, while for the men, “he just gets to live his life.” Through Baker’s work as a teacher’s assistant, Schatz enhances the themes by interweaving words from the literary women Baker admires. This isn’t a thriller, but with the heightened anticipation of Baker’s actions as her time of childbirth draws near, it often reads like one. The story offers utter believability and character intimacy, including Baker’s observations about the changing body she no longer recognizes. It’s nearly impossible to look away.
