Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner

Meanwhile Theresa begins to go out to more marginal places and have sex with complete strangers, often older men. Although James initially seems nice, over time he appears to become controlling and disrespectful of Theresa. However, the couple do not have sex and James wants a traditional courtship and monogamous relationship, which Theresa sees as stifling her freedom. Her parents approve of the responsible James, seeing him as a potential husband for Theresa. Through her job, Theresa also meets and dates an Irish-American welfare caseworker named James (Atherton). He leaves in a hurry and gives her a Quaalude pill to counteract the cocaine, but this causes her to oversleep and arrive very late for work the next day, angering her employer and students. She frequents a bar at night where she meets a charming but vain Italian-American character named Tony (Richard Gere) who she ends up sleeping with, and taking cocaine with. With Katherine's encouragement, she moves out of her parents' home into an apartment in Katherine's building. Theresa takes a job teaching deaf children, and proves to be a gifted and caring teacher. Theresa finds first love and loses her virginity with her much older, married college professor Martin ( Alan Feinstein), who ends the affair just before her graduation, leaving Theresa feeling used and lonely. Meanwhile, her beautiful 'perfect' older sister, Katherine (Weld), has left her husband and embarked on a wild lifestyle involving multiple affairs, a secret abortion, recreational drug use, and a short-lived marriage to a Jewish man. Theresa later finds out that her scoliosis is congenital and that her aunt had the same condition and committed suicide as a result, Theresa is reluctant to have children of her own.

While in college, Theresa lives with her repressive Polish-Irish Catholic parents, and suffers from severe body image issues following a childhood surgery for scoliosis that left a large scar on her back. Set in the mid-1970s, the film traces the sexual awakening of Theresa Dunn (Keaton), a young Irish-American teacher searching for excitement outside her ordered life.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner