"That poor kid," she says now, shaking her head. "I knew from the get-go: if I'm miserable, he'll be miserable, too. If I'm happy, at least he has a shot. So I did what I wanted." This parenting style took a toll on them both. "He's resentful," Donofrio says bluntly. "I was a nut. I cracked an egg on his head."
At 30, she crossed a street without looking both ways and was hit by a car. "I could have died. I had a teenager," she says. It was a wake-up call for a wannabe writer who wasn't writing. Still working a Wall Street typing job, she entered Columbia's MFA program, where she met "a community of writers, my pack," including mentor/hero Richard Price. When she published a Village Voice essay "about being an Italian-American feminist hippie whose father was a cop," Price sent her to agent Gail Hochman, who gave invaluable advice on writing a book proposal ("Imagine you have five minutes to tell a garden party why they should be interested in the story of your life."). Editor Jim Landis bought it.
Riding in Cars With Boys was a breakout success, and producer James L. Brooks (Big) snapped up film rights. Donofrio dreamed of being played by Cher; director Penny Marshall favored Marisa Tomei. But after the script languished in development for 11 years, the younger Drew Barrymore landed the role.
"I'm very grateful it was made. One hundred thousand people bought the book," Donofrio says, acknowledging they're very different animals. "But you know, it's kind of a cult movie. Online, you see girls enacting the scene with Brittany Murphy where Drew practices telling her mother she's pregnant. There's a lot of truth in that movie. They took some risks. I'm happy it exists."
Young Bev was becoming Older Bev. The rift with her adult son, which haunts her in Searching for Mary, starts to heal in Astonished, as Donofrio becomes a doting grandmother to Jason's son Zach. She's now living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; after combing the internet for monastery retreats, she goes to bed, and is awakened at knifepoint.
Donofrio doesn't dwell on the rapist's capture and trial. But with chilling empathy, she recalls the "lustful" feelings of power she got as a child tormenting a younger boy, concluding, "Exerting our will over others makes us feel powerful. Could the rapist have resisted the urge? Could I have?"
The retreat becomes urgent, a place to pray in silence or tell her story compulsively, to learn how to heal. She visits five monasteries before choosing the Nada Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado. After telling a priest she has issues with the conservative Church, she's moved by a line in the psalm he gives her: "'The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.' I choke up: this is how God feels to me. And this is how I want to be."
Instead, she's "as organized as pebbles dumped on a driveway," with a selfish streak and snappish temper. In other words, she's us, flawed but hopeful, and blessedly frank: "If transformation were a job, I'd be fired. I am so self-involved, I embarrass myself."
Donofrio finished writing Astonished while living with one of its most endearing characters, a wildly eccentric renegade nun named Estrella. "I never knew how I was going to come to peace with this thing that had happened," she says. "Writing helps you make sense of it. Before I wrote Riding in Cars With Boys, I always had this wariness around people: I'm not who you think I am—I was a teen mom, my dad was a cop. After I wrote it, I didn't have to tell anybody anything. It's done, it's all out there. And now I don't need to keep telling people about the rape anymore."
Before moving to Mexico, Donofrio had 24 rental addresses; her grandson told her she was "born on a vagrant breeze." Now she was rootless again, house-sitting friends' off-season beach houses. Offered yet another house-sit, she thought, "No. I have to commit to someplace and have furniture again." That someplace was Woodstock.
It seems like a perfect fit. Everything delights her: the Woodstock Writers Festival, hiking the Catskills, the eclectic spiritual community. She recently joined Clark Strand's rosary group; "They're all Buddhists," she marvels.
Toward the end of Astonished, Donofrio writes, "Lately, I get pleasure out of not knowing. Lately, God, who is an "it" to me, seems pure abundance; a beneficent energy, whirling, penetrating, moving everything everywhere; a wind chiming through the trees. All is well, all is well, all is well. Even when it doesn't seem so God is lavishing us with love that's up to us to allow." Amen.