Most of us (well, me) walk around secure in the knowledge that no one else could possibly have the deep dark thoughts we are having, the memories that we bury. That no one needs to know. That they are not a fundamental part of who we are; that we can fake it; that faking it is a small price to pay for being liked or respected --- normal.

And then there’s Claire Dederer, determined to be honest about her desire and the ambivalence of her desires. As she put it in an article in The Atlantic magazine, “If you’re in this business, you’ve got to forget about the existence of your mother --- or the existence of anyone’s mother.”

Dederer’s previous memoir, POSER: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, explores the vicissitudes of young motherhood and her complicated feelings about her own mother. In LOVE AND TROUBLE, she confronts her egregious sexuality as a young woman and, perhaps even more threatening, her current sexuality as all that glorious youth with its firm, dewy skin is undeniably slipping away. And she makes you laugh most of the way.

"At times shocking, always brave and very funny, LOVE AND TROUBLE will resonate with anyone who is up for a brutally frank exploration of one woman’s sexuality in our confused, conflicted culture."

The first several chapters describe the now of Dederer’s world: safe, secure, predictable. She loves her husband, her kids and her friends. And yet, late at night, “You could hear the girl you were, a disastrous pirate slut of a girl, breathing down your neck.” She and her other middle-aged female friends call each other to cry; the tears well up seemingly out of nowhere, for reasons they aren’t sure of, despite the famous regional chill. “In Seattle, where rain and traffic are two snakes twining, choking the body of the city, forbearance is an art. We don’t cry, we just put on more Gore-Tex or maybe use the driving time of our commute to listen to a self-improvement book on tape.”

The middle chapters dive into the particulars of the young Claire’s obsession with love and sex. Tomboy Claire idolizes her older brother, Dave, to the point of wanting to be Dave, to be a boy. And if she can’t have that, she can make them fall in love with her. Which she proceeds to do, in her Seattle prep school, in coffee shops on “The Ave,” in art movie houses. After high school, she goes to Oberlin College, where she’s too homesick and busy with sex, drugs and rock and roll to absorb much of what is on offer in the classroom. She drops out not once, but twice. “But honestly, it was time to leave. You can’t pay that kind of tuition just to love someone.”

One of the many great things about this book is the inventiveness of the presentation. Dederer employs many frames to explore this “disastrous pirate slut of a girl.” The Oberlin adventures find their home in an abecedarium, as in “A is for Acid.” Chapter 11 is titled “Recidivist Slutty Tendencies in the Pre-AIDS-Era Adolescent Female.” It’s a hilariously long-lens, academic look at what this girl was up to. From the UNDERLYING CAUSES section of this faux abstract: “Sex, for that short while, seemed a mostly benign thing, possibly even an improving hobby, like learning the dulcimer or making your own yogurt.”

Readers who complain about memoir authors being self-involved make me crazy. “It was all about her,” they say. Well, of course it is; that’s why we’re reading it --- to find out what it’s like to be her. A good memoir involves truth telling and bravery. It involves, as Dederer points out, considering a thing from more than one angle. “And so we must once again do like old F. Scott Fitzgerald and try to hold opposing ideas in our teeny brains, both at the same time. Two facts, in conflict and simultaneously true… I get to own and even enjoy my excitement over being dominated or punished, but I also get to be pissed at a culture that didn’t protect me.”

At times shocking, always brave and very funny, LOVE AND TROUBLE will resonate with anyone who is up for a brutally frank exploration of one woman’s sexuality in our confused, conflicted culture.