If the Girl Never Learns by Sue William Silverman

If the Girl Never Learns by Sue William Silverman

You are The Girl, and The Girl is a Badass.

From the opening lines, it's clear The Girl at the center of these poems is damaged--which is another way to say she's a survivor. If the Girl Never Learns moves from the personal to the mythic to the apocalyptic, because The Girl would do anything, even go to hell, to save her soul. So, she resists, takes action to overturn society's suffocating ideal of Good Girldom. The poems' sense of breathlessness reflects The Girl's absolute need to control her own destiny, to outrun her past, while at the same time chasing a future she alone has envisioned and embodied. Because The Girl is, above all else, a badass.

Sue William Silverman has written three autobiographies. The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew is part of the University of Nebraska Press's American Lives Series. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award Series in Creative Nonfiction went to Because I Remember Fear, Father, I Remember You. Love Sick: One Woman's Struggle Through Sexual Addiction was adapted into a Lifetime TV Original Movie. Courageous Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir is her craft book, while Hieroglyphics in Neon is her poetry collection.

Sue has appeared on numerous nationally syndicated radio and television programs, including The View, Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, a John Stossel Special on ABC-TV, CNN-Headline News, the Montel Williams Show, the Ricki Lake Show, and the Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, among others. She was also featured on WE-TV's The Hidden Lives of Women in an episode. Sue teaches in Vermont College of Fine Arts' low-residency MFA in Writing program.