Girl Trouble: An Illustrated Memoir - Softcover

Kerry Cohen is the author of nine books, including the bestselling Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity; Seeing Ezra: A Mother's Story of Autism, Unconditional Love; The Meaning of Normal; The anthology Spent: Exposing Women's Complicated Relationship to Shopping; and The Truth of Memoir: How to Write about Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity. She has appeared on Dr. Phil and Good Morning America, and has had her essays featured in The New York Times Modern Love series and The Washington Post. She has a psychotherapy practice and lives with her family in Portland, OR.

Tyler Cohen is a cartoonist who uses autobiography and surrealism to explore parenthood and female experience in her book Primahood: Magenta. Her work has been published in the Ignatz-award winning anthology, Qu33r, The Feminist Utopia Project, What’s Your Sign, Girl? and online at MuthaMagazine.com.
|Bestselling memoirist and psychotherapist Kerry Cohen (Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity) explores complicated female friendships in Girl Trouble. Beginning with her relationship with her sister Tyler Cohen, who illustrates the memoir, Kerry examines the many ways female friendships can affect a girl’s life. From bullying and failed friendships to competition and painful break ups, Girl Trouble brings forth a story of how one girl learned to navigate the many difficulties of feminine friendships. Girls and women everywhere will relate to the confusion, the hurt feelings, and they will also learn along with Kerry how to make better choices over the years.

Praise for Girl Trouble
This book is so goddamn good, you'll plotz!
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

I was mesmerized by Girl Trouble. Kerry Cohen writes about friendship and longing with such searching intensity, I simply could not put the book down until I’d read it all. Girl Trouble is raw, real, and revelatory.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Kerry Cohen traces a delicate thread that runs thorough so many women’s lives from our earliest years to our last, we navigate the intricacies of female friendship. Cohen’s concise portraits bring to life all those girls we knew and loved madly and hated, and envied and feared carrying the reader from the years when girlhood itself felt as tender and raw as a bruise, through the emotional minefield of friendships in early womanhood, to the later laughter and ease that we finally are able to share with our female friends. A small treasure.
Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

A clear and concise survey of one woman’s journey through a life’s worth of difficult and sometimes devastating female friendships. Cohen bravely details how one’s family of origin impacts our later relationships, and accurately demonstrates how we must first sort ourselves out before we can establish healthy bonds with others.
Blake Nelson, The City Wants You Alone

Praise for Loose Girl
Cohen’s brutal honesty about her relentless request for companionship is refreshingly relatable.
Entertainment Weekly

Cohen recounts her harrowing litany of hookups through clear, poignant, spare-no-details prose.
Marie Claire

Sensual yet sophisticated . . . explores why people yearn to be loved.
Self

A quick and riveting read. . . . Thanks Kerry Cohen, for being real.
Playgirl

A fascinating cautionary tale . . . Loose Girl will make you contemplate your own relationships.
Zink

Her candor may help under-21 readers steer clear of the whole mess, while those who survived similar ordeals will appreciate her tale of survival.
Booklist

An illuminating memoir of her misspent younger years when a desperate search for love led to a series of promiscuous sexual relationships with men.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Compelling. . . . Cohen is a fine writer. She is introspective, and there’s a wry humor that penetrates Loose Girl.
The Oregonian

Cohen’s training as a psychotherapist is clearly evident. She reveals an impressive analytic prowess as she exposes the damaging self-effacement that underlies the seeming assertion involved in attracting men to her and then driving them away. . . . An important look at the dynamics of female sexual power and promiscuity in general.
Kirkus Reviews

Cohen’s memoir is a deeply poignant, desperately sad account . . . commendably honest and frequently excruciating to read.
Publishers Weekly

Praise for Seeing Ezra
Most mothers have a few things in their arsenal to make the job go easier: instincts, honesty, and devotion. Some mothers, like Cohen, have even more: fierceness, attachment, and plain bravery. Seeing Ezra is the story of motherhood beyond all reserves. Bravo to Cohen for giving us such a deep, rich tale of motherhood.
Vicki Forman, This Lovely Life

What is the experience of mothering an autistic child? And what is the experience of negotiating the world's reaction that autism? This is a book to think with, a brave meditation on love and acceptance. Not just for mothers this is a beautiful story about being human.
Ariel Gore, Hip Mama and Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness

Cohen writes an intense and penetrating story about the challenges of being the mother of a child who is classified outside the boundary of so-called 'normal.' Her honesty is gripping and heartbreaking, her struggles are laid bare for the reader and her perseverance on behalf of her child is inspiring. Seeing Ezra is an important book.
Jennifer Lauck, Found and Blackbird

I am not a mother and have never raised a special-needs child, yet Cohen's frank memoir kept me riveted. She effortlessly transcends her personal story to show how we all are affected by traditional definitions of normal.”
Brenda Miller, Blessing of the Animals and Season of the Body

"With unflinching honesty and immeasurable grace, Cohen leads the reader through the experience of parenting a different child. Cohen outlines with refreshing clarity the complicated world of a child on the autistic spectrum, but more than this, she poignantly builds a portrait of a wholly unique human being. Ultimately, Seeing Ezra is a love story and a portrait of Ezra as Ezra, with all the simplicity and complexity that entails. It is a story skillfully told by a mother who understands her son for who he is and for what he brings to the world on his own terms.
Robert Rummel-Hudson, Schuyler's Monster: A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter

Praise for Dirty Little Secrets: Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity
Very few people can write about teen girl’s sexual promiscuity with the candor, empathy, and intelligence Kerry Cohen does. She did it first with Loose Girl, when she looked back on her own experiences. Now, in Dirty Little Secrets, she expands her focus to challenge all of us to get beyond our own discomforts and judgments and look at the powerful reasons girls so often value their self-worth based on their ability to be sexually seen” by others. I think any girl who reads this will recognize at least one girl she knows as that girl may be looking back at her in the mirror.
Rosalind Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of Queen Bees and Wannabes

As compassionate as it is enlightening, Kerry Cohen’s Dirty Little Secrets argues for female safety and desire, and provides a road map for authentically healthy, vital sexuality.
Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways

Cohen’s book is a must read for it sheds light on the truth behind the secrets and lies teens tell themselves. It exposes that a teen’s love of sex” may just be the opposite a fear of rejection. Women of all ages can relate and benefit from this book I can’t recommend it enough. Dirty Little Secrets is urgently needed.
Amber Smith, model and star on Dr Drew Pinksy’s Celebrity Rehab and Celebrity Sex Rehab

So much of what is written about teens and sex is either frantically alarmist or needlessly titillating. Dirty Little Secrets is different with compassion and insight, it takes us into the misunderstood and underexplored world of teen girls and promiscuity. Once a loose girl” herself, Kerry Cohen has been there” and it shows in her empathy, her insight, and her remarkable ability to draw out the truth. Dirty Little Secrets busts the myths, breaks down walls, and takes us where we need to go to understand the private lives of so many young women today.
Hugo Schwyzer, PhD, women’s studies professor and co-author, Beauty, Disrupted: the Carré Otis Story

Ms. Cohen’s Dirty Little Secrets is a perfect catalyst for mother/daughter discussions. It is a safe place to start a scary talk . . . a wake-up call. . . . Settle in, relax, and embrace its shocking content.
New York Journal of Books

Praise for The Truth of Memoir: How to Write about Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity
The Truth of Memoir illuminates, with graceful detail and revelatory examples, the fears and joys of writing and publishing a memoir. If you're scared to write a memoir, read this book. If you've written a memoir but are scared to publish it, read this book. Cohen reveals her first-hand experience of overcoming these fears and includes stories of other memoirists who have also found their inner strength. This book bravely enters the sometimes dark and tangled world of memoir writing--and finds light and clarity on the other side.
Sue William Silverman, Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir

Kerry Cohen’s The Truth of Memoir is a smart, soulful, psychologically astute guide to first-person writing. She reveals everything you want to know but were afraid to ask about telling your life story.
Susan Shapiro, Only As Good as Your Word

Praise for Easy
The writing is realistic, insightful, and nonjudgmental. This book can provide teens with some understanding as to why people might make risky choices while offering readers the assurance that bad decisions need not be irrevocable.
Library Journal

Cohen's writing talent saves the novel from becoming too didactic, even as the story hammers home a lesson that is far better for teenage girls to learn from a book than from experience.
Booklist

Praise for It's Not You It's Me
Despite offering moments of levity, Cohen gives plenty of weight and attention to Zo's darker feelings-her broad spectrum of emotions and gradual recovery ring true.
Publishers Weekly

Girls will relate to the teen's heartbreak and healing.
School Library Journal

Praise for The Good Girl
Pacific Northwest Book Award Honorable Mention

Readers may not like everything about this protagonist, but they should come to understand her and root for her recovery. Lindsey's rival's comeuppance and her connection with Kyle are well worth waiting for.
Children’s Literature