‘The Big Hurt’: A woman’s search for intimacy and acknowledgment

In “The Big Hurt,” author Erika Schickel bares all about her affairs with unobtainable men, her experience at a hippie East Coast boarding school, and the familial abandonment she’s experienced. Photo by Anne Fishbein.

Erika Schickel’s new memoir, “The Big Hurt,” is about how she blew up her marriage and family for an affair with a famous LA crime novelist, and how that echoed an experience she had in high school, when she was kicked out of her East Coast boarding school for sleeping with a music teacher.

“My whole life, I had been looking for the connection I had been denied by my mother. … I was just trying to find home. And I was in a loveless marriage. … I was starved for intimacy, and by that, I don't just mean sex. I mean the whole thing … being understood, being seen, recognized, acknowledged,” she says.

Press Play also gets reviews for the latest film releases: “The Many Saints of Newark,” “Titane,” a restoration of “Hester Street,” and “The Jesus Music.”