The Big Hurt tells two coming-of-age stories: one of a lost girl in a predatory world, and the other of that girl grown up, who in reckoning with her past ends up recreating it with a notorious LA crime novelist, blowing up her marriage and casting herself into the second exile of her life.
Sharp-tongued and darkly hilarious, it is also one of the more relentlessly honest, big-hearted reckonings with abuse to come out of the #MeToo era ... When you strip away Schickel’s cheeky, effervescent prose and charismatic self-deprecation, there is little to laugh at: compulsive shoplifting; self-absorbed, sort-of-famous parents in the midst of a 'spectacularly ugly zeitgeist divorce'; and a series of bleak, often exploitative sexual relationships with older boys and men ... It’s a sad story, and sadly common. But what makes The Big Hurt so singularly rich and harrowing...is that it percolated while Schickel was ensconced in a tumultuous, marriage-ending affair.
Stirring if shaggy ... While the many flashbacks can become tiresome, the probing examination of love and acceptance crackles with intensity. Schickel’s raw honesty makes this hard to put down.
The memoir is well written, and the two intertwining stories are well-structured. However, the author is repetitive about certain elements...and sparse on others ... Schickel is a fluid writer and can be funny, occasionally hilarious, but when she strains toward humor amid a painful recollection, the humor often falls flat. Still, her narrative timing is often spot-on ... The scenes in which Schickel digs the deepest leave the longest-lasting impact—if only there were more of them ... A flawed yet affecting portrait of a vicious, repetitive cycle.
