Dirtbags

by Teresa McWhirter

Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. Spider is a scrappy kid growing up in rural B.C., and when a tragic event causes her world to implode she heads to Vancouver for solace, distraction, and experience. We witness a shifting morality as Spider moves through chaos and anarchy, often of her own choosing, with no certainty of truth besides what is found in brief encounters. She soaks up the world around her, getting swept up in an accelerated scene of punk music, partying, booze and drugs, forever dogged by a nagging question from her “When everything in your life is fleeting, what do you hold onto?” Dirtbags deals with the bonds between women, the cycle of poverty, self-destruction, loss of family, the outlaw code, and the fragile beauty of the human condition. This is Teresa McWhirter’s follow-up novel to Some Girls Do . Praise for Some Girls Do : “ Some Girls Do reads like candy, but offers philosophical tidbits and personal revelations. ...” — BC BookWorld “... a sharp poetic glimpse into the yearning but hopelessly unfocused lives of a group of marginal urbanites in a small West Coast city ...” — Elle Canada

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

After extensive travel across Canada and the US, her first novel, Some Girls Do was published by Raincoast/Polestar books (2002).Teresa McWhirter grew up in Kimberley, in the east Kootenays of interior BC. She received a BA with a double major in English and Creative Writing from the University of Victoria.

Following an assortment of jobs including teaching English in Korea, driving an ice cream truck, and scaring children at a haunted house, she published Dirtbags (Anvil Press, 2007) and YA Skank (Lorimer, 2011).

During the past few years Teresa has toured Europe and North America with punk rock bands, gathering material for her new novel Five Little Bitches (Anvil, 2012)

She lives in east Vancouver.

Reviews

[Mikey · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you have had this kind of life, you will like this book. As someone who finds most of these girls choices very far fetched and frankly stupid, I found it very hard to get into this book and stopped reading halfway through.

[Naomi McCormick · Rating 3 out of 5]

the writing is at times pedantic and obnoxious, but i'm a big supporter of small press...and if you live in vancouver, it will be easier to overlook the middling writing for the wonderful descriptions of being young and punk in our rainy seaside city.

[Jessiellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been a long time since I read this book, but I believe I was 20 and the timing was perfect