(Welcome to our new blog column Two Page Minimum, wherein I take a new book out to happy hour, and give it a few minutes to grab my attention. Two Page Minimum is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today?

Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, by Kerry Cohen. (Seemed [in]appropriate, given that a blogger friend who will remain URL-less recently told me that whenever he sees a girl sitting alone at a bar with a book, he assumes she’s waiting to be hit on.)

Where’d you go?

Beulahland—happy hour is 3-7 pm daily, $3 wells, $3.25 micros, and $1 off the food menu.

What’d you drink?

Mt. Hood Brewing’s Cascadian Pale Ale.

What does your date say about itself?

From the dust jacket: “Loose Girl is Kerry Cohen’s captivating memoir about her descent into promiscuity and how she gradually found her way toward real intimacy. The story of addiction—not just to sex, but to male attention—Loose Girl is also the story of a young girl who came to believe that boys and men could give her life meaning.”

The cover image reminds me of this Bookslut post, and very much looks like the type of picture that would get deconstructed in a media literacy workshop at the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls.

Is there a representative quote?

“Boys are connected to this independence for me. I’ve seen the movies, read the books. I know the ways a boy can make a girl feel. I believe they have the capacity to pull me out of the muck of my life, to save me, and I will believe this for a long, long time.”

Will you two end up in bed together?

This question is in kind of poor taste, considering the book’s subject matter. But, speaking metaphorically and with some surprise: Yes, we will. My patience for memoirs is very, very limited—particularly those that involve struggles with sex/food/drugs. Been there, right? But unlike 80% of memoirists, Cohen can actually write. Not only that, but she’s incredibly self-aware. (The MA in counseling psychology from Pacific might have something to do with the insightful way she frames her promiscuous past.) This isn’t a sensationalist account of how many dudes she’s banged: Her underlying concern is with the non-sexual neediness that drives her into these situations, and she conveys this uncomfortably familiar impulse (at least, I’ll wager, to a lot of the ladies in the crowd) remarkably well.

Kerry Cohen reads tonight at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, 7:30 pm. Melissa Lion has a review in the O if you want more on the book—and just so you know, the “I bet I can get laid at that reading!” joke has already been made by my coworkers like, 6 times.