Girl Reel

The summer that Morris (Eden Built by Eves) was allowed to ride her bike to the cinema by herself was the true beginning of her love affair with film. In this chatty, slight memoir, she tries to recapture an 11-year-old's confusing medley of desires: the longing to see precociously smart young girls like herself represented onscreen, to discover visual blueprints for adolescence amid the tantalizing glimpses of adulthood and, ultimately, to find images of women loving women. She recalls the movies she watched over and over again, like Paper Moon (featuring Tatum O'Neal as the girl who talked back); American Graffiti, with its infectuous soundtrack; and later, the not-so-straight Julia, in which Jane Fonda meets Vanessa Redgrave. There are the familiar icons: Jodie Foster as an outspoken tomboy; Barbra Streisand in Yentl, fighting the intellectual sexism that allows a Jewish woman to be lovable or learned, but not both. Unfortunately, Morris omits the details that might have raised the book out of its self-referential, celebratory mode to more sustained insight. (What did her hippie parents think when she took them to the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show? How did they react when she came out?) It's hard to believe that even an earnest 16-year-old would really say, ""Thank you for seeing the real me... more and more I realize the only way I can grow is up."" Although the writing swings awkwardly into a preachy and self-congratulatory tone in the latter half of the book, the story of Morris's early girlhood and the glimmerings of her intellectual coming-of-age are most plainly evocative in this cinematic syllabus for one girl's personal and social enlightenment. (June)