Man Crazy

Man Crazy is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1997, that tells the story of a young girl's descent into self-harm, sexual abuse, cult brainwashing, and subsequent rescue.

First edition cover (Dutton)

Plot summary

Man Crazy is told from the point of view of a young woman, Ingrid Boone, writing to her therapist about her life. At the beginning of the novel Ingrid's father, Luke Boone, a hot tempered Vietnam veteran, is absent and on the run after killing a man over a drug deal. Ingrid and her beautiful mother, Chloe Boone, drift from place to place as Chloe carries out a series of relationships with different men. Chloe's attention is directed to her lovers and to alcohol more than to her daughter.

In adolescence, Ingrid begins to self-harm, compulsively scratching her face and body to the point of inflicting sores. She also turns to promiscuity and drug abuse. She doesn't have any real friends and is known as "Doll Girl" as she openly gives herself to much of the school's male population.

Despite her troubles, Ingrid is a good student and wins a prize for a poem, which she is asked to read at a school assembly. Her anxiety and low self-esteem cause her to appear in front of the school with her face bloody from scratching and reading, not her own, but another poet's work.

After leaving home, Ingrid gets involved with Enoch Skaggs, a brutal, charismatic leader of the motorcycle gang/cult, Satan's Children. Her nickname becomes "Dog Girl" because of her blind devotion to the cruel Skaggs. She undergoes one dehumanizing act after another: gang rape, physical mutilation, being locked in a cellar for days, and watching a sacrificial killing. In a last-minute escape, Ingrid is rescued when there is a showdown between the biker gang and the police.

Ingrid undergoes counseling, including the telling of her story, and a suggestion is given of a relationship with her doctor.[1][2]

Literary criticism

Brigitte Frase of the San Francisco Chronicle called the novel well-constructed but seemingly constructed from psychological profiles of dysfunctional families, traumatized war veterans, and cult leaders and followers.[2] A. O. Scott of the New York Review of Books felt that the violence seemed gratuitous because of the "absence of a persuasive context" and that Skaggs's hold over Ingrid was insufficiently explained. Scott called the prose "fluid but impersonally competent".[1]

gollark: At least it has generics.
gollark: Oh, and it's not a special case as much as just annoying, but it's a compile error to not use a variable or import. Which I would find reasonable as a linter rule, but it makes quickly editing and testing bits of code more annoying.
gollark: As well as having special casing for stuff, it often is just pointlessly hostile to abstracting anything:- lol no generics- you literally cannot define a well-typed `min`/`max` function (like Lua has). Unless you do something weird like... implement an interface for that on all the builtin number types, and I don't know if it would let you do that.- no map/filter/reduce stuff- `if err != nil { return err }`- the recommended way to map over an array in parallel, if I remember right, is to run a goroutine for every element which does whatever task you want then adds the result to a shared "output" array, and use a WaitGroup thingy to wait for all the goroutines. This is a lot of boilerplate.
gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.
gollark: - `make`/`new` are basically magic- `range` is magic too - what it does depends on the number of return values you use, or something. Also, IIRC user-defined types can't implement it- Generics are available for all of, what, three builtin types? Maps, slices and channels, if I remember right.- `select` also only works with the built-in channels- Constants: they can only be something like four types, and what even is `iota` doing- The multiple return values can't be used as tuples or anything. You can, as far as I'm aware, only return two (or, well, more than one) things at once, or bind two returns to two variables, nothing else.- no operator overloading- it *kind of* has exceptions (panic/recover), presumably because they realized not having any would be very annoying, but they're not very usable- whether reading from a channel is blocking also depends how many return values you use because of course

References
  1. Scott, A. O. (1997-09-21). "Angel of Darkness". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2018-09-09.
  2. Frase, Brigitte (1997-09-28). "Twisted Family Ruins Unhappy Girl in Oates' `Man Crazy'". SFGate. Retrieved 2018-09-09.
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