THE VIRGIN CHRONICLES, Marina DelVecchio’s heartbreaking memoir of sexual repression and awakening, opens with an explosive, contemptuous epithet hurled at a young woman by her adoptive mother. “‘Putana,‘ my mother, Ann, screams at my retreating back, her head sticking so far out of our third-floor window that I think she might just fall out.” Putana, and its cultural variants, signifies “whore,” a sexually promiscuous woman, and in THE VIRGIN CHRONICLES, it is a curse in every sense of the word—not merely a vulgar slur, but a malediction that Marina shoulders like a cross as she makes her way through a world that objectifies and condemns her at every turn. Despite what her mother thinks, however, Marina is a virgin, determined to abstain from sex until the time is right. At 21, Marina is more interested in the chaste romance of Disney movies than in sex, but no matter. In her mother’s eyes and to a hypersexualized culture that treats women as sexual objects, Marina is an absurd oxymoron: a virginal whore.

This paradoxical identity is central to DelVecchio’s narrative of her sexual coming of age, following Marina—called Kathryn before reclaiming her birth name—from a childhood ruled by shame and sexual repression to an adulthood in which her desires for freedom and self-actualization contend with deeply-rooted fears and unresolved traumas. Marina leaves her mother’s toxic clutches and begins to build an independent life for herself, only to encounter workplace sexual harassment and constant pressure from men who only want her for sex. There seems to be no place in the world where she can be anything but a virgin whore. But as Marina comes to realize, she has internalized her mother’s toxicity and become her own oppressor, dominated by the need for parental approval and fear of abandonment. Having spent her adult life asserting ownership of her body by protecting her virginity, Marina must face the truth, that she cannot truly be her own person until she lets go of her fear of her mother and her cold, degrading conception of love. “She is all I have ever known,” Marina muses. “Her kind of love is all I have known.”

DelVecchio—author of a young adult novel, Dear Jane, and a psychological thriller, The Professor’s Wife: A Novella—is a gifted storyteller, and in THE VIRGIN CHRONICLES she tells her own story with equal parts matter-of-fact honesty and a novelist’s flair for vivid portraiture. There are, of course, harrowing depictions of cruelty and injustice, but also moments of sublime sensuality: “On any dance floor, I can close my eyes and feel the notes, the drumbeat, the bass as it skips along the length of my arms and legs, up to my torso, through me and into me, like a lover with knowing hands.” Throughout, DelVecchio avoids the temptation to sensationalize her account or turn it into the kind of lurid confessional that ends up as little more than a litany of salacious transgressions.

A memoir of sexual liberation, Marina DelVecchio THE VIRGIN CHRONICLES tells a complete and powerful story that takes readers on a difficult but ultimately hopeful journey.

~Edward Sung for IndieReader