Women of a certain age and attitude will immediately recognize “Girlbomb” as the title of Janice Erlbaum’s long-running Bust magazine column. For more than a decade, it’s been her forum on the state of the union as it pertains to women. Bust writers aren’t asked to hide their agendas, but this quick-reading memoir sheds more light on why Erlbaum feels so passionately about women’s rights. A chronicle of her difficult past, it’s told in the same relaxed, girlfriendy voice that makes her Bust dispatches—and blog—so relatable.
For Erlbaum, the ordinary emotional explosions of an ’80s adolescence in Manhattan were compounded by her mother’s highly questionable choices in men. Girlbomb‘s first chapters, where she’s dealing with her tumultuous household, are tough to read. Her mother’s inability to help herself is infuriating to both the author and the reader.
By 15, Erlbaum had had enough, threatening to leave if her abusive stepfather came back into the picture. He does, and she bolts—spending the next 18 months in a shelter and a group home. The people she meets there put her life into perspective, as she witnesses the result of abuses she barely escaped. Singled out for her whiteness, Erlbaum is threatened by a hostile, pregnant girl so self-loathing that she hurls her stomach into staircases. She watches as a housemate misses curfew and is unceremoniously thrown out on a winter night.
Erlbaum’s rebelliousness doesn’t end when she reconciles with her mother and returns home. By 17, she’s out the door again. Girlbomb chronicles her indulgence in sex and drugs throughout high school; her dalliances with PCP and cocaine are described in mind-bending detail. Meanwhile, her mother is zombified with anxiety meds, so Erlbaum’s support group is composed of drug dealers and cold, petty girlfriends. Her life improves somewhat, apart from the drugs, when she finally finds a boyfriend she trusts. The year they spend together is a particularly poignant highlight of Girlbomb.
Having pulled herself out of such circumstances by 18 (where the memoir ends), today Erlbaum volunteers at a shelter like the one that housed her. In her blog, she recently wrote about a girl at the shelter who surprised her by picking up a copy of Girlbomb. The girl tells her, “My roommate had read your book, and she said, ‘[Erlbaum] used to live here, and she was messed up too, and now she’s doin’ all right, so you should read this.’ And it is mad good. It is mad inspiring.” Three days later, Erlbaum posted a positive clip from The New York Times on her blog, though it probably didn’t mean half as much to her.
