Free To Be You and #MeToo: Erika Schickel on Coming of Age—and Coming Undone—in the 1970s

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2021

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gen Xers and young Baby Boomers can be nostalgic about the freedoms of growing up in the 1970s. But there was a darker side to that era, too, especially for girls. Feminism was on the ascent, but the sexual revolution was moving even faster, bringing profound changes to behavioral norms and assumptions about pleasure and consent. In her new memoir, The Big Hurt, Erika Schickel recalls a childhood that was both magical and ruinous, one in which she played freely on the streets of her Manhattan neighborhood but, at the same time, attended a private school where (with the blessing of the headmaster) Hollywood casting agents scouted for girls to audition for the role of a child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby (incidentally, Jeffrey Epstein was teaching math at this school at the time). As a teen at boarding school, Erika was seduced by a male teacher and asked by the administration to leave before graduation. Her mother, meanwhile, applauded the relationship and Erika even briefly lived with the teacher before heading off to college. Decades later, while living the life of a conventional married mom in Los Angeles, Erika found herself embroiled in an obsessive affair with the legendary crime writer James Ellroy, a man who was himself damaged by the violence and tragedy of his youth. Erika spoke to Meghan about the book and the revelations that came to her over the more than ten years it took her to write it. During those years, the #MeToo movement came along, further complicating Erika's story while making it all the more relevant. Guest Bio: Erika Schickel is the author the memoir The Big Hurt (Hachette Books, 2021) and You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (Kensington Books, 2007). She has taught memoir and essay writing at UCLA and privately. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, LA City Beat, Salon, Ravishly, Tin House, Bust Magazine, and The LA Review of Books, among others.

Transcript

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0:00.0	older men have been predating upon young women since the dawn of time, you know,
0:09.7	and that social moors around it are what have changed, you know.
0:14.1	But I don't think that it's any less damaging.
0:16.9	I don't think that, you know, as mature as girls are,
0:20.7	and especially girls of our generation, again, who were being sort of overeducated and left to their own devices, right?
0:29.8	So we had a lot of information, but not a lot of supervision, that the girls of our generation, because we came of age in that moment and now we are in our
0:42.3	maturity in this moment are able to parse their experience and frame it in a way that my mother's
0:52.3	generation couldn't my great Aunt Francis's generation couldn't.
0:56.9	You know, it's just the social mores have changed so much. And thank God, thank God, because I don't
1:04.5	think it was ever okay.
1:10.3	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. If you listen to this show a lot,
1:16.6	you've probably heard me talk about the idea that growing up in the 1970s and 80s, for girls
1:22.7	especially, had something about it that was uniquely liberating. The way I've looked at it, we were beneficiaries of many of the achievements of the women's movement. This, after all, was the era of the famous free-to-be-you-and-me children's record, the Marlow Thomas Project, which sang about girls growing up to be plumbers if we wanted to, and boys having dolls if they wanted to.
1:46.3	And even though there were plenty of hypersexualized images of women all around the popular culture,
1:52.2	they weren't wallpapered over the culture the way they are now.
1:56.5	They were confined pretty much to magazines, a few TV channels, and a few R-rated movies.
2:03.4	But there was a darker side to that time, too, for girls and young women.
2:07.7	As much as feminism was on the ascent, the sexual revolution was always a few steps ahead
2:14.2	and was profoundly reshaping norms of behavior and assumptions about what
2:19.1	constituted healthy human interaction. Part of those assumptions were that children,
2:24.6	girls especially, could handle sexual information and even sexual activity just as well as adults.
2:32.2	That, along with a common parenting style, often referred to as
	...

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