Beverly Ann Donofrio wasn't bad because she hung out with hoods - she was bad because she was a hood. Unable to attend college, she lost interest in everything but riding around in cars, drinking, smoking, and rebelling against authority. After her teenage marriage failed, Bev found herself at an elite New England university, books in one arm, child in the other. Then, furnished with ambition, dreams, and five hundred dollars, she took herself and her son to New York to begin a career and a life.

An outrageous and touching memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys is about becoming middle-class and the compromises made between being your own person and fitting into society. But mostly it's a story of a teenage mother who, as her son grows up, becomes an adult herself.