The Steep Cost of One Night on the Beach With a Boy

After getting pregnant at 16, the author’s community and loved ones, who turned their heads at everyone else’s mistakes, didn’t extend the same kindness to her. It took its toll.

Publishing this Creative Nonfiction Classic, which first appeared in the 20th issue of the magazine with the headline “Shunned,” and discovering the brilliance of Meredith Hall was one of the most meaningful and memorable experiences I had as the editor of Creative Nonfiction. Both the story and the author represented exactly why I had founded the magazine to begin with. Not just to provide a space for writers looking to push boundaries and open doors beyond poetry and fiction, but more importantly to discover new writers and support their work as they found their voices, developed their style and honed in on the stories they needed to tell. Meredith, as you will see when you read the piece, had already achieved those goals — quite amazing when you consider that this was the first essay she’d ever written and she did so, she told me, in one sitting, working nonstop over the course of 13 hours. The piece would go on to win the Pushcart Prize and launch Meredith’s incredible and ongoing career and a body of work that includes a memoir, Without a Map — from which an early excerpt was published in Creative Nonfiction — and a highly acclaimed novel, Beneficence. 

To bring it full circle, 10 years after we worked together at Creative Nonfiction, I found myself lost and unfocused in the middle of a memoir I was writing. I was in need of someone who could look at my work objectively who understood the challenges inherent in writing painful and difficult-to-entangle personal stories, and I knew exactly who I could reach out to. It was the writer who I had published early in her career whose work I so very much admired and respected: Meredith Hall.  

—Lee Gutkind, co-founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine

Illustration by Karlotta Freier

Even now I talk too much and too loud, claiming ground, afraid that I will disappear from this life, too, from this time of being mother and teacher and friend. That It—everything I care about, that I believe in, that defines and reassures me—will be wrenched from me again.

Family. Church. School. Community. There are not many ways you can get kicked out of those memberships. As a child in Hampton, N.H., I knew husbands who cheated on their wives. Openly. My father. I knew men and women who beat their children. We all knew them. We all knew men who were too lazy to bring in a paycheck or clean the leaves out of their yards, women who spent the day on the couch crying while the kids ran loose in the neighborhood. We knew who drank at the Meadowbrook after work each day and drove home to burn Spaghetti-Os on the stove for the children. We even knew a witch. We called her Goody Welsh, as if her magic had kept her alive since the Salem days. But this was 1966. All these people were tolerated. More than tolerated; they were the Community. The teachers and ministers’ wives and football players and drugstore owners. They lived next to me on Leavitt Road and Mill Road and High Street. They smiled hello when I rode my bike past their clean or dirty yards, their sunny or shuttered houses.

Then I got pregnant. I was 16. Family, church, school—each, which had embraced me as a child—turned its back. Shunning is supposed to keep bad things from happening in a community. But it doesn’t correct the life gone wrong. It can only expose the transgression to a very raw light, use it as a measure, a warning to others that says, “See? That didn’t happen in our home. Because we are Good. We’re better than that.” The price I paid seems still to be extreme. But I bet it was a while again before any girl in Hampton let herself be fucked in the gritty sand by a boy from away who said love.