Hollywood hypocrisy

"Riding in Cars With Boys," the uplifting memoir of a teenage mom done good, is twisted into a smarmy fable designed to promote abstinence-only sex education.

By Amy Benfer

Nov. 1, 2001 | The first time I picked up a copy of "Riding in Cars With Boys," I distinctly remember dropping the book on the floor and screaming, "Shit!"

At the time, I was in the Wesleyan University campus bookstore, browsing a section reserved for books by Wesleyan authors, trying to convince myself that, one day, my hopelessly expensive education would land me a book contract. It was the fall of 1991, and I was an 18-year-old frosh. My daughter, then 2, had finished her morning croissant and was tagging along behind me, trying to drag me back to the cafe for a second round.

The reason "Riding in Cars With Boys" made me swear was that, rather than convince me that I would write one day, the book was evidence that at least one story I could write was already written. Like me, the author, Beverly Donofrio, was a smart teenage girl who got pregnant in high school, and then, according to the jacket blurb, went on to attend "an elite New England university" with her kid.

The university was Wesleyan, of course. Which meant that I had a doppelgänger. Or rather, since she had been there first, some 15 years earlier, I was someone else's doppelgänger.

I tried to rationalize my way out of Donofrio's shadow, relying on an 18-year-old's defensive conviction that the life I was living had never been lived before: I was pregnant at 15; she got pregnant at 17! I went to college at 18, the same age as the rest of my classmates; she went at 26, after attending a community college, making her what Wesleyan called an ACE (Adult Continuing Education) student!

Whatever. I got over my delusions of uniqueness. I was, after all, a smart teenage girl. There was nothing inherently special about being a teen mother or a single mother at an elite university: I was ordinary. And lucky. So was Beverly Donofrio -- at least that is what I learned from her memoir, which I devoured once my bitterness evaporated and curiosity took its place.

Later on, a professor who knew us both tried to set me up with Beverly. I had wanted to see her, and I had her phone number for a while, but I never called. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was enough for me that she was out there, blazing a trail.

Then I got another chance to meet her -- by watching Penny Marshall's film of Donofrio's memoir. Only I didn't really meet her, because as anyone who has seen the movie knows -- and I emphatically do not encourage anyone to see it for recreational purposes, and absolutely not if you think you're going to see how "real" single mothers live -- the movie "Bev" is not my Bev, not our Bev, not Wesleyan Bev.

Perhaps Marshall was afraid that the true story of Beverly Donofrio -- disseminated in a blockbuster film -- would threaten the endowments of prestigious universities across the country. Fifteen-year-old girls everywhere would suddenly be inspired by this teen mom as role model to get pregnant and apply for full scholarships. Perhaps Marshall is secretly funded by one of those abstinence-only sex education groups. Perhaps Marshall never got around to reading Donofrio's book.

But whatever the director's motives, she has completely dismantled the story of Beverly Donofrio and reassembled it to fit a very old mold, one that emphatically portrays teenage motherhood as a tragedy with many victims, a terrible mistake that must be derided in art as in public service announcements -- with a ham fist and plenty of clichés.

Donofrio's book is about a girl who very clearly chooses to escape a conventional life -- in her case, a working-class family with a traditional cop father and a submissive housewife mother -- for an unconventional life of being an unapologetic bad girl, then a smart, unapologetic bohemian single mother. Her pregnancy is most certainly accidental, but the pleasure she takes in her child, her life as a single mother and her writing is genuine, all the more so for being a pleasure she has earned through choosing how she would most like to live.

Marshall's Donofrio is broken at 15, the moment her life deviates from convention. And she never gets it back.

Next page: Scenes fabricated to turn a story of success into one of failure