The Girl's Club

The Girls Club is the coming-of-age story of a young, white, working-class woman. Set in the 1970s, the story revolves around Cora Rose as she copes with her emerging sexuality, a life-threatening illness, and the conflicts created by the growing disparity between her desires and her Catholic upbringing.

Growing up Catholic and working-class greatly affects Cora Rose and her  sisters' adolescent relationship to each other. Cora Rose's distress at being caught in an embrace with her best friend Stella leads her to sleep with the first boy who shows interest, and she is married with a child at age eighteen. As they grow up, the sisters help and hinder each other in their struggles to take control and responsibility over their lives. When Cora Rose develops cancer,  she faces huge physical and emotional challenges, which further complicate her feelings about her sexuality and increase her need for her sisters' support. She becomes involved with a woman she meets at a bar called "The Girls Club". Her siters Marie and Renee play out their own struggles as Cora Rose leaves her husband, fights to keep her child, and overcomes religious and social prejudices that threaten her personal integrity, but the bonds of sisterhood underpin all the struggles and joys they each encounter.

Paperback, 287 Pages, Published 2011