Girl Land by Caitlin Flanagan

Author:Caitlin Flanagan [Flanagan, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316192644
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

3. Tammy Bellah: In and Out of Girl Land

A few years ago a friend I grew up with in Berkeley called and asked me if I had known Tammy Bellah. She was a Berkeley girl, a decade older than we were, who had killed herself at age nineteen in 1973. The name was familiar and it turned out that she had three younger sisters, one of whom, Abby, had also died young: after a night of partying she and some friends had flipped a car on Marin, which is a very steep street leading from the highest point in the city all the way to the flats. I remembered that incident—the car had come to rest outside of the fence of my elementary school, which had given the event a lurid frisson to us children, and Marin itself was the site of many similar teenage sorrows, giving it a haunted quality. My friend told me that the girls’ mother, Melanie Bellah, had published books about both of her lost daughters, and he said that I should read the one about Tammy, that there were certain things I would recognize in it. He was right. The seven-hundred-page doorstop of a book reminded me in many powerful and uncomfortable ways about what Berkeley was like in those days, about the ways in which so many parents had decided—not out of laziness, but out of a combination of certain philosophies and of a youth culture that had outpaced their ability to comprehend or control it—to give their teenagers a tremendous amount of freedom. The city was awash in kids who came from respectable families but who were pursuing lives that no middle-class parent today would ever condone, would in fact horrify them. Tammy: A Biography of a Young Girl is like the real-life version of Go Ask Alice, about the ways in which it was possible, bit by bit and with your parents right beside you, to slip away into drugs and a kind of masochistic, anonymous sex, and all the while to both celebrate and fear what was happening to you.

Tammy consists of Tammy’s diaries, letters, poems, stories, and school essays, as well as a long commentary on these documents written by her mother. The commentary—along with the impetus to publish so many private writings—is intrusive; its main thrust is to explain and exonerate the series of strange and often appalling parenting decisions that played a role in Tammy’s tragic fate. The document is long, weird, and compelling. It describes a girl and a family whose lives were strange and extreme, and whose philosophies and inclinations, when combined with some of the cultural ideas that were taking root in places like Berkeley in the late sixties and early seventies, were almost destined to result in disaster. They also reveal, in a grotesque manner, the dangers the counterculture had to offer girls.

“Tammy was feminine in the extreme,” writes her mother; “by that I mean that she was maternal, devoted to serving others. She

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