Smith, Mary-Ann Tirone: Girls of Tender Age
by Debra Hamel on January 08, 2007
Originally posted at: book-blog.com
tags: book reviews, girls of tender age, mary-ann tirone smith, memoir, true crime,
Free Press © 2006, 289 pages [amazon]
Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s Girls of Tender Age is a memoir wrapped around a true crime story. She writes about growing up among the “working stiffs” of 1950’s Hartford, Connecticut under less than ideal conditions. Smith’s mother was distant and negligent:
“Until I am in first grade, I have no idea that when you are hurt, some people have the urge to hug and comfort you. In the first grade, my fingers get caught in the girls’ lavatory door and my teacher, Miss Wells, takes me in her arms and hugs me to her big bosom. I don’t understand why this is, a body surrounding mine, pressing sympathy from one heart into another. But my mother is the prototype of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Her father was a sort of saint who devoted his life to caring for the author’s autistic older brother at a time when no one understood that condition. Smith’s autobiographical chapters--compelling enough without the introduction of further drama--are interspersed with brief sections, sometimes chillingly succinct, on the career of serial rapist and murderer Bob Malm:
“It was during this time [while in service during World War II] that Bob pursued his interest in forced sexual contact with preadolescent girls; he could only have sex successfully with preadolescent girls and only after terrorizing and hurting them, leaving some of them unconscioius, or possibly, dead. A man could get away with this in Okinawa.”
Eventually, the two threads of Smith’s story meet, tragically, when the author is nine years old.
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