(Long Island, N.Y.) Want a really good read this summer? Pick up Bad Girls Club but be warned: you won’t be able to put it down. Author Judy Gregerson’s intense book takes readers into the mind of sixteen-year-old Destiny. Her troubles are not about boys, gossip or making friends—her issues are deeper and darker than the average teen:
- What if your mother wanted your little sister dead and you were the only one who could stop her?
- What if you had a plan to save her, but you had long ago been silenced by your family?
- What would you do then?
All unsettling and haunting questions. Destiny wants desperately to just be normal again. Like many teens, she wants to be loved, heard, and supported. But most of all—she wants her mother back and desperately tries to save her from the mental illness that tore her away and is ripping apart her family. And in the midst of school and her boyfriend (who just doesn’t understand what she’s dealing with at home), Destiny holds a secret: something her mother did at Crater Lake to her little sister Cassidy. She hides her shame underneath baggy clothes and hooded sweatshirts. She’s left to wrestle with a horrible truth that needs to be told. But at what cost?
Think it can’t happen in this day and age? Think again. The nightly news in recent years proves it can and it does. What really goes on in the mind of an abused and abandoned teen? Gregerson, who wrote Bag Girls Club in a span of seven years, taps into the deepest longings of a girl faced with her mother’s mental illness and all the self punishment that goes along with it. I recently caught up with Gregerson to chat about her new young adult novel.
First—you’re from Long Island! Where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I was born in Greenport and grew up in Southold. As I look back, I can see that it was an ideal place to grow up. Small, New Englandish town, everyone knew everyone. I had a great high school experience because the kids I went to high school with I’d known all my life. Our summers were spent on the water and my father rebuilt an old cabin cruiser (it was totally rotten) and we went to Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod. Now I live north of Seattle, again near the water because I don’t think I could ever leave it.
I know your family has an intriguing history–especially your father. Can you tell me more about that?
My father was a model and he was on the cover of Life Magazine in 1961. Our family did a spread on fallout shelters around the time of the Cuban Crisis and he got to wear a fallout suit for the cover shot. He also modeled for Viceroy cigarettes, Metropolitan Life, Dial Soap, Remington Shotgun Shells, and many more. My sister did Pepsi ads. And all this was because a modeling agent came up to my dad in Lindy’s Restaurant in Brooklyn and asked him if he could make him famous.
My father also spearheaded the scallop industry in Peconic Bay. He organized baymen and turned what was nothing into a real money making venture for a lot of people. I know he was very proud of that. In fact, I spent most of my childhood shucking scallops in our garage. Later he went into the lobster business, also, and was one of the well known wholesalers in the area. My brother is still in the business in Southold.
Bad Girls Club touched me on so may levels. How did you come up with the premise for such a moving story?
The idea came from two places. First, it came from a story a man told me back in 1998. He was selling his mom’s house (she had died) and he was very unwound about the whole thing. I came to find out that when he was five and his brother was three, his mom had locked them in the house, set it on fire, and left them there to die. When he told me the story, I just stood there and cried because I’d never heard of such a thing. Then came the stories of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates.
The idea that a mother would want to hurt her own children absolutely horrified me. But what horrified me more was that children actually lived with parents like that. Do you know that approximately 1500 children are killed a year by someone they know, usually family, but one third are killed by their mothers? What kind of person could do that, that’s what I wanted to know. And then I started thinking about children who lived in situations like that and I started to wonder how they would find ways to survive if they had a mother like that. That’s how the story started. It grew and changed over the years and became the story of a teenage girl who knew what her mother wanted to do and who spent her whole life trying to hold her mother together so she wouldn’t kill anymore.
How much of Bad Girls Club comes from your own pain. Can you share a little about that?
I grew up in the perfect home. At least on the outside. It you stood on the outside and looked in, you’d think, “Wow, what a wonderful family.” From the inside it was a different story. My parents were both alcoholics. My father managed to “control” it, I never realized as a kid that he was drunk. But my mother was one of those people who, after having two drinks, was basically on her lips. And she was also one of those people who couldn’t do it long term, so she disintegrated one summer, right before my eyes, and was taken away, never to return.
The pain of losing my mother, the horror of having my whole family fall apart, was devastating. In the midst of all that, my brother had a car accident and the front of his skull was crushed in. He was in Huntington Hospital for almost a month and had several brain surgeries. I think that as a kid I suffered so much loss that it was easy for me to draw from that when writing this story. I was so alone and so scared most of my childhood that I really understood how my main character would feel.
I’ll admit–I cried many times reading your novel. I wanted to hold my kids close and tell them how loved they are. How are other parents responding to this book?
I have had two phone calls by very teary women. One called to tell me that she had seen herself in the characters and that she realized she had been very hard on her kids and she thanked me for writing the book and showing her how the cycle of abuse works from generation to generation. It opened her eyes to what she learned from her mother about how you treat kids – some of it not very good – and she told me that she was going to change her life immediately.
I got a letter from a psychologist in NY who said that he was recommending that this book be put in every middle and high school health class and that all young adults read it. I’ve heard from teachers who are telling me it’s better than A Child Called It, because it explains why people abuse and how it is a generational problem. Other parents have told me that it has opened their eyes to what living in a situation like that is like and that the story was so real to them that they couldn’t put it down, that they were called back again and again by the main character to finish the story.
I understand the National Association of School Psychologists is reviewing your book in their fall issue of “School Psychology Review”. Are you hoping to shed some light on mental illness?
I am hoping to put a face to the stories you hear in the news about parents who lock their kids in cages, starve them, and otherwise abuse them. I want those kids to have a voice. I want the world to know that these kids exist, that their lives are hell, and that there are resources out there to help them. As a child, I had wished that someone would get me out of my situation, but no one did. Not until I was seventeen. The trauma that is imprinted on the minds of children who live in these awful situations can take a lifetime to overcome if they aren’t helped, and I want to put out the call to help them. They need a voice and I want to be that voice.
I’m available to speak to schools and libraries, parenting groups or other associations. As a survivor of childhood trauma and abuse, I can well speak on the subject. I would really like to build myself a nice little niche of speaking engagements and radio talks. That’s my goal over the next year.
- Get a copy: Bad Girls Club by Judy Gregerson is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online or through any bookseller.
- Win a copy: It’s simple! Just go to www.judygregerson.com email Judy from there with “Long Island Exchange” in the subject line, and enter to win a free ARC.
