Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar, published in 1975, was based on a true crime that had happened only two years previously. It was made into a film in 1977, and while I had a recollection of seeing parts of the film and have long had the book on my shelves and so was familiar with the story, turning that last page and seeing the story play out to its tragic and terrifying end was still shocking for me. What drives a woman to such destructive behavior? Picking up random men in bars and taking them home to have sex with them. Rossner has created a stunning portrait of a woman in an era of liberation and sexual revolution. I don't think she was looking for love, at least not in the sense that most people tend to look for it through meaningful relationships, but it would seem that everything in her life was setting her up for that horrifying moment.
In less than 300 pages Rossner has created a very convincing portrait of a complex and complicated young woman. It's quite a journey from her troubling youth to the beloved and talented schoolteacher she became who trawled the singles' bars looking to hook up with men. Here's Theresa Dunn's sad trajectory in life.
As a girl, the youngest sister of three (and a favored older brother who was killed in a training camp accident when he was just fresh out of high school), she was raised Catholic in an Irish-American household but always felt the ugly duckling. As a girl she contracted polio and later would have to spend a year in hospital after having to have surgery on her back to correct the subsequent curvature of the spine, or scoliosis that came along with it (I have vague recollections of having my own back checked for scoliosis in school curiously). She never felt quite as good or as loved or as close to her parents as her sisters appeared to be. It all seemed to come easy for them-both looks and meaningful close relationships.
While her sisters were getting married, becoming involved in serious love affairs, trying to have babies (or getting pregnant at the wrong time and then having abortions) she went off to college to study to become a teacher. There she falls for one of her instructors, an English teacher who is himself a writer. She and half the other women are in love with or have crushes on him. But Theresa is smart and talented even if she can't quite believe it of herself. Maybe she is a bit of a wallflower, afraid to share her scars and so keeps them all hidden (both the real and perceived). But when she realizes she has his admiration and an interest in a no-strings-attached (at least for him as a married man with children) flirtation she begins to come into her own. She falls for him. They have a relationship for the whole of her college years, both romantically and as his scholarly assistant. And she comes into her own in a sense. In a way, this is her liberation from at least some of the insecurities she felt growing up.
No more wallflower but a woman who speaks her mind with irony and sometimes sarcasm and a sense that she has a power at least sexually and intellectually. She becomes a teacher herself, though to small children and despite her desire to continue on, the teacher-student relationship must come to an end. She has little desire for any sort of serious relationship after that. Is it a sense of rejection she felt? She never seems to have a wish to marry and knows inherently that she will never be able to have children thanks to her own childhood illnesses. In a way that opens up the possibilities to have physical relationships with few repercussions. One of her sisters, with a string of failed relationships behind her introduces Theresa to parties where both drugs and sexual partners are ample.
Is it liberation she feels when she goes looking for men? Or is it deep down a lack of self-respect. By day she is a respected teacher who is good at her job. Her fellow teachers try and set her up with available and successful men or get involved in self-awareness groups. But it seems almost like she wants to sabotage her own happiness. Instead of truly falling for the one man who truly loves her, admires her, respects her and would happily have a serious relationship with an eye towards marriage, she is drawn instead to a man who only belittles her, uses her, is likely involved in seedy or underhanded business. But one relationship is sexually fulfilling, a little wild and reckless, and the other quite tame, tender and hesitant. But in those last, harrowing moments of her life it is the one man who cares for her that she calls out to.
In the novel, and perhaps--as this is based on actual events--in one woman's (how many women really . . .) real life, too, Theresa goes looking for men in places like Mr. Goodbar, reading her book, accepting drinks and then taking strange men back to her apartment. Only sadly for Theresa, she chose the wrong man to take home. Whatever fulfillment or release or sense of happiness she was looking for was paid for with her life.
One of the blurbs on the book calls this "an emotional hurricane" and indeed it leaves the reader feeling utterly drained at the end. It is a story, a portrait of a woman, that will likely stay with me for a very long time.