Firstly, I am grateful to Anne @ I’ve Read This for mailing me her copy of Skid Dogs by Emelia Symington-Fedy. It’s not every day you get mail from Canada (unless you’re Canadian). Please be sure to check out Anne’s review, as my post will be less of a review and more of a mulling over society and the implications of our attitudes toward sexual behavior. Because Symington-Fedy’s memoir describes her relationship to self-worth and sex, and it’s a pretty intense read with graphic descriptions, please consider this your warning that there is strong language and adult content ahead.

I told Anne that I wanted to read Skid Dogs after reading her review and seeing the blurb on the cover comparing it to Stand By Me. We all know the movie Stand By Me, right? Four boys, with parents who don’t care, head down the train tracks to find a dead body, which they only know about after overhearing some older teens who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Skid Dogs does have an element of Stand By Me. You see the the train tracks on the cover, which beautifully matches my vision of the places where Emelia Symington-Fedy meets her new friends, a gang of girls, in a small Canadian town. But that’s where the comparison ends, as Symington-Fedy’s memoir reexamines her teenage sexual past and her mother dying of cancer.

In the opening note, the author explains that some people in her memoir are composites and that some parts are a bit creative to fill in the gaps, which I get. No one remembers swaths of dialogue from twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. Symington-Fedy writes, “though artistic license was taken, and fictitious scenes built for dramatic purposes, this is my attempt at the truth.” Skid Dogs has two timelines, one starting in 1991 and one starting in 2011.

In 2011, Taylor Van Diest, a high school girl living in Armstrong, British Columbia, was brutally beaten while walking on the train tracks the author had frequently traveled as a youth. Van Diest died of her injuries, and Armstrong locks down in fear, for the murderer is still out there. During this time, Symington-Fedy keeps making the seven hour journey between Armstrong and her current residence in Vancouver because her mother is dying of cancer, which she has been battling off and on since the early 1990’s. The story of Van Diest’s murder is an opportunity for Symington-Fedy to do some journalistic work for a radio program, but it feels tacky to talk about a recently deceased teen girl. Symington-Fedy stays in her hometown with her mom for a time, gets irritated, they fight a bit, and Symington-Fedy leaves for Vancouver, frequently to turn around a day or two later and make the seven-hour drive back to her mom.

In the summer of 1991, thirteen-year-old Symington-Fedy has just moved to Armstrong, and after noticing some well-hidden train tracks, she starts walking on them. Four girls are hanging out and invite Symington-Fedy to join them. They instantly become a girl gang the likes of the boys in Stand By Me. However, the scene in which the girls meet is the only one that demonstrates the closeness of childhood friendships that we see in Stand By Me. Just before school starts and the girls will enter 8th grade, they make a pact to not become sluts after hearing vivid sexual rumors about another girl their age. They list specific sexual acts and swear they won’t do those things until 10th grade.

From there, Symington-Fedy and her friends spend all of their time trying to gain the favor of boys at school. Quickly, the feeling of friendship that so warmed me at the beginning of the 1991 section dissolved. And this is where I go into my reactions to the book, which is not the same as a review. I’m not sure when Symington-Fedy made the leap from sexually innocent 8th grader to constantly engaging in sexual acts, but I found myself being highly judgmental while reading.

It starts when Symington-Fedy’s simple birthday sleepover idea goes out the window, and the girls get their hands on alcohol and have a party with boys from their school. The author describes chugging from a bottle of vodka and ends the story in the hospital with her having her stomach pumped and learning that she and all of her friends were probably raped. They decide that if they let boys have sex with them, the girls win because then they won’t be raped. Connecting the 1990’s and the 2010’s timeline, Symington-Fedy points out that Taylor Van Diest was murdered likely because she fought off her attacker, who likely wanted to rape her. If she would have just let him rape her, she would have lived. However, this moment of insight didn’t connect as profoundly as I assume the author wanted it to, for the girls are often described as giggly, enjoying the sexual attention they receive, and choosing to go off with boys instead of staying in their group of five.

Because Symington-Fedy does not leave much space for reflection in her earlier timeline, I couldn’t understand her behavior. She lived with her independent, strong single mother and a sweet younger brother. She went from being a kid to someone who guzzles booze without any thought behind it. At what point did she decide to engage in such behavior, and was there no hesitation? The entire situation is problematic because the boys she and her friends hang out with are all in school together — around the same age. Sometimes it’s a senior hanging around them when they are in 8th or 9th grade, sometimes it’s other 8th or 9th grade students. I kept wondering about the legality of hanging out with other students from a school that had such a wide rage of ages in it, from her friend who was twelve to some of the boys, who were eighteen.

Not only that, but while Symington-Fedy does not want to engage in sexual behavior, not even French kissing, she also seeks it out and doesn’t say “no.” She’s convinced herself that sexual acts are a way to keep someone waiting. In fact, in the 2010’s timeline, Symington-Fedy has a boyfriend who is unable to hang out one night, and she writes, “But an old thought pops in: If I sucked his dick he’d come over just fine. I shake my head, embarrassed by the impulse. Also, I don’t suck dick anymore. I filled my quota as a teenager. I’ve got no sucks left to give.”

To be honest, I’m grossed out and saddened by this. In a way, the author admits to luring men with sex to keep them chasing after her, but she also experiences time and again that giving her body to a boy doesn’t make him stay, like her, or even acknowledge her the next day. So, for me, the gap in the writing leaves me asking how she developed her mindset. One minute she and her friends are swimming in a lake, having fun like thirteen-year-old children, and the next she’s constantly navigating sexual favors. Skid Dogs is severely lacking from reflection because it spends more time recreating “dramatic” scenes.

While the entirety of the book is upsetting, I also couldn’t stop reading. I was hoping for Symington-Fedy as a teen to have an “ah ha” moment or to rejoin her friends as the kids they really want to be. The author does provide some insight when she lets her teen boyfriend perform sexual acts she does not want just so he’ll be kept hanging on while her family goes to Disney, where she feels she can be free to be a kid.

Instead, sexual performances are acts the girls must do to keep up the juggling act. This also baffled me because the girls were not typically “putting out” for boyfriends, but for random boys they would meet at parties. So, what does it mean that I feel so judgmental? Am I victim shaming when Symington-Fedy and her friends agree to engage in derogatory sexual acts because they’ve sought them out and agreed to do them? Are they victims?

In many instances, yes, they are victims. Several accounts of rape happen (or are thought to have happened) while the girls are passed out or black-out drunk. On the one hand, I could ask, “Why do you keep going to parties and drinking enough to kill yourself?” On the other hand, just because you drink enough to kill yourself does not mean you’ve agreed to be raped. The same thing happens again, and again, and again, and deep down I’m wondering when someone is going to accuse her rapist or avoid situations that have proven to be dangerous. Oddly, in the 2010 timeline, everyone takes precautions before the murderer is captured, which stands in stark contrast to the author and her friends putting themselves in the same situations. Just because you want to walk your dog where someone has been murdered does not mean you’re asking to be murdered, but when an event happens that shows you it’s possible, you stop walking your dog where someone was murdered.

Eventually, Symington-Fedy’s friends shun her because she’s become such as “slut” — a skid dog, they decide, which is a made-up term — that they want to distance themselves from her. She is kicked out of the group because she broke the promise they made in 1991 about waiting for 10th grade before they do all the sexual things they said they would not. Truly, Symington-Fedy makes it sound like her friends are engaging in the same sexual behavior as she the whole time, so I was surprised to learn they thought she was “a skank.”

Only during one small passage from 2012, when Symington-Fedy looks back on her teen years, does she give readers some sense of reflection about what she was doing:

What had happened to us, back then? What had they [the teen boys] done? Was there a single sexual encounter that felt mutual, shared? With the language I have now, like coercion and fawning, the answer is no. But the words rape and assault were saved for struggling and screaming. And we’d allowed it, a lot of the time, their ineptitude. Sometimes we even forced it upon ourselves. So, what’s that called? Their demands on my body. The physical pain. My assumptions they had the right to it. No pleasure — ever. What is the name for this?

But truly, this is one of the rare moments during which Symington-Fedy reflects on her life. And this is only a discussion of the 90’s sections.

In the 2010’s sections, as her mother declines from her most recent cancer diagnosis, the author pops Ativan like candy, smokes, and gets mad at her mom. In one scene, her mother takes her to a special mediation class during which everyone lays on the floor in the dark and is touched gently by another person to promote healing. Symington-Fedy only goes because she blew off her mom the day before when she needed help, and now she feels the need to be a better daughter. In the dark, her mother reaches for Symington-Fedy’s hand, and Symington-Fedy snatches it away. Why this coldness? There is a hint that the mother was disappointed in her daughter’s behavior as a teen, but little is explored there. What was Symington-Fedy feeling toward her mother when she was a teen? We go from mom’s sick with her first diagnosis of cancer to mom has kicked the author out to live with her father for unspecified reasons other than a vague sense of being unable to properly pay attention to her daughter.

Overall, this is a highly unsettling memoir that seems more about letting boys orgasm on and in the author than teen girl friendship. Skid Dogs is less clear about how girls become victims than it is about when one girl decides to do things sexual things she doesn’t really want to do so someone will pay attention to her. But, it also fails to demonstrate why she sought attention from boys she’s just met in her new town rather than from four other friends. The author was not a loner nor lonely — a baffling fact I kept turning over in my head without finding answers.

Skip ahead twenty years, and Symington-Fedy still avoids describing her feelings and attitude toward her mother and instead romanticizes her days walking on the train tracks with her friends (which made up very little of the book) and how Taylor Van Diest died on those same train tracks.