When Roberta Israeloff opened her eighth-grade diary for the first time in thirty years, she discovered it wasn't an easy read. Its pages took her back to a critical year in the tumultuous, treacherous passages of adolescence - the time, in Carol Gilligan's words, "when girls are in danger of drowning or disappearing."Israeloff didn't drown that year - her grades didn't plummet, she didn't seriously rebel - nor did she disappear. But the metamorphosis she underwent was no less profound for being a quiet one. The ambitious, athletic, competitive "tomboy" who loved math and science was transformed into an introverted, tentative young woman who had discovered the love of words that would make her a writer but had lost the bold, unconstrained voice of her childhood.With her journal entries as a point of entry, Israeloff relives that watershed year and the turnings it marked in her sexual, emotional, and intellectual identity. Reaching back in time and forward to her present as a writer, wife, and mother, she has woven a searching account of the bittersweet realities of growing up female, one that will resonate with women of all ages. Read Less