Carlene Bauer grew up in a world as laundered and tucked tight as a well-made bed. Her upbringing in suburban south New Jersey placed God at the center of the universe and everything else, from sexuality to art, at its far, dark edges, creating in her a duality of scriptural certainty and apocalyptic unease. It wasn't a friendly deity her family worshiped, but a fiery evangelical patriarch with an itchy finger on the cosmic trigger. As Bauer waited around for molten brimstone to rain down, though, something distracting happened: adolescence. Pop culture crept in, displacing theology, and her surging hormones and urgent curiosity lured her out of the walled garden of her childhood into a thicket of rock music, books, and boys. She was born again, this time with no assurance of salvation.
In Bauer's memoir of faith interrupted, Not That Kind of Girl (Harper), the consciousness at her story's center is seduced by the temptations and diversions of New York City and drawn into its beguiling chaos with the Smiths blaring on her mental soundtrack. She may as well be Eve 2.0, conscience-stricken and spiritually half-naked, making us root for her in her lonesome wanderings by conjuring up the journey of transformation that all of us undergo when we strip off the roles our parents chose for us in favor of improvised intellectual wardrobes scavenged from found ideas, favorite books, flea markets, and cool friends' closets. In Bauer's case, the stakes are especially high, though, because as she careens through the bright, provocative downtown streets assembling a personal sensibility in movie theaters, record stores, and bookshops, she risks the loss of her eternal soul. She seems to lose her bearings at times, then find them again, then lose them once more. Her blessed center can't seem to hold.
What does hold, sentence by sentence and page by page, is Bauer's sure grip on our sympathies. Her style is light but not trivial—the laughs she wrings from her moral dilemmas are shaded with melancholy longing. Her passion for truth never leaves her, it just shifts forms. She manages to evade damnation while turning herself into a wised-up city girl, but the hovering presence of her pious origins renders the journey soulful and suspenseful, a pilgrim's progress through modern-day bohemia.