by JULIET WATERS

Amanda Boyden has insisted in past interviews that she avoids autobiography. But there does seem to be one obvious similarity between Boyden and the teenage narrator of her second novel, Pretty Little Dirty.

Both women project a serene loveliness that masks a risk-taking personality. In Boyden’s case that means an eccentric CV as a trapeze artist/gutter cleaner/model. In Lisa’s case it means a life that veers from an exclusive Kansas City private school in the late ’70s, to the mid-’80s L.A. hardcore punk scene.

Boyden was in town a couple of weeks ago with her husband, Joseph Boyden, author of the Canadian bestseller Three Day Road. Turns out, however, that she has her own interesting road story. The couple teach at the University of New Orleans and, like most residents of that state, she had to evacuate during Katrina.

All lanes on the highway she was driving had been redirected towards Texas. Then, with little warning, the traffic rules changed and Boyden found herself in a lane heading back towards Mississippi. “I’m thinking, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to go to Mississippi,’” she remembers. “But I was driving a jeep and I started looking and looking and I saw this huge grassy median in between the two lanes. So I turned and brought the jeep up and over. And I guess I managed to do this in front of a live television crew with a satellite and a woman standing on the other side filming the traffic, because suddenly I hear on my car radio, ‘Oh no. Now look at this. What is she doing! Oh No! People are following her! Now this is the sort of thing that is going to cause accidents. It’s so wrong!’ And I’m just there, like, ‘Hi...’”

Fortunately, adds Boyden, the cameraman eventually cut in with his two cents. “He said, ‘To these people’s credit they really thought they were going to Texas... and they needed to get over there.” And so in the end, in this case, it all worked out for the best.

While it might seem a stretch to compare coming of age in the late ’70s, early ’80s to evacuating hurricane Katrina, any girl who grew up then can attest to what an intensely chaotic time it was. All lanes seemed to be leading out of this bad place called patriarchy, but few of the older women evacuating seemed to really know where the hell they were going. One day you were following your peers, or your mother even, in the fast lane towards sexual liberation. The next day you were stranded in a deadlocked lane marked slut. If you were lucky you might find a way to jump the median. But that didn’t mean you were ready to have anyone follow you on that path. There was no Google, there was no Oprah, there was little, if any, advice on healthy self-directed sexuality. And the revolution, from your angle anyway, was definitely not being televised.

This is the world that Lisa is growing up in, and it’s an intensely dark and alienating one, made worse, not better, by the fact that she’s smart, beautiful, popular and people are looking towards her and her charismatic best friend, Celeste, for guidelines on how to live. Sometimes they think they’ve got it figured out. By the time they realize they haven’t, tragedy has struck.

Pretty Little Dirty will be for some a dark drive down memory lane. For others it might be an introduction to a lost world where women struggled, clueless even when they seemed confident. If nothing else, it’s a not-so-nostalgic trip into mosh pits at the foot of Black Flag, Bad Brains, the Ramones, Bad Religion and more. And in the end it probably won’t matter whether you grew up in Kansas City, L.A. or Montreal, in the ’70s or the ’90s, whether you’re a girl or a guy. Boyden has captured a dark night of the soul that should resonate with almost anyone.

Pretty Little Dirty by Amanda Boyden, Vintage, pb, 419pp, $21