“I didn’t have an abortion for two reasons—both people.”

So begins Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s The Book of Phoebe, one of my favorite young-adult books and one of a handful of novels written in the 1980s that tackled the subject of young women, sex, and reproductive rights with at least as much humor as concern.

Ostensibly the tale is of a smart-assed 19-year-old Yale student who deals with an unintended pregnancy by holing up in Paris until her due date, but it’s a wide-ranging story-within-a-story about loyalty, regret, and love—and, of course, a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body.

More than 20 years after its publication, I not only still reread the book every few years, but haven’t quite given up hope that Tirone Smith will decide to write a sequel. But let’s back up.

Phoebe Desmond sets herself apart from many a dreamy, wispy young adult heroine in the first few pages of the book, in which she visits her school’s gynecologist to deal with a backfiring IUD.

’Doctor’ was writing on his prescription pad and began speaking to me without looking up. I became rather annoyed when being addressed by a bald scalp, but even men get to hold conversations with the tops of doctors’ heads. However, that’s American medicine. Or, as Agatha Christie would put it, there it is.

‘You’ve got a little infection in there, Miss Desmond, caused by the IUD piercing your cervix. Take this antibiotic, and don’t have intercourse for a month. You’ll have to go on the pill. Some of us girls just aren’t made for IUDs now, are we?'

Obviously not, Doc. ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘my boyfriend could use condoms.’ He didn’t look up. ‘Many men don’t receive the full pleasure of intercourse using condoms, Miss Desmond.’

I said, ‘Many women don’t feel the full pleasure of intercourse with infectious IUDs hanging out of their cervixes.’

In short order, Phoebe finds out she’s pregnant and is unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend before she has a chance to break the news. Determined to have the baby in secret and miss only six months of college, Phoebe takes off for Paris, where her childhood best friend, Marlys, has become an international sensation as the Josephine Bakeresque star of the Folies-Bergere.

When Marlys takes off on a tour of the continent and sends Phoebe to live with Ben, a handsome young artist, the story really begins. Skipping back and forth between Phoebe’s childhood stories and journal entries—which feature an autistic man named Tyrus and a host of oddball gangsters and crazy aunts—and her life in Paris amid terrorist bombs, a burgeoning love affair with Ben, and a friendship with the older matron who will become her baby’s adoptive mother, the book is a wild journey from Paris to Queens to Grant’s Tomb that packs in references to Oriana Fallaci, Ted Williams, and Pearl Harbor.

Along the way, we come to understand why Phoebe chose not to terminate her pregnancy, but to carry it to its heartbreaking (and yet still hilarious) end. The final scene of the book kills me every time—I’m tearing up just writing about it. In crafting the conversation in which Phoebe tells her mother about her baby, and her mother talks about her own years-ago abortion, Tirone Smith nails the way in which a good decision can still feel terrible, and captures the relief of momentary, if awkward, bonding over the most unspoken, and the most searing, of choices.

The book isn’t perfect, of course, and the subplot in which Phoebe realizes her old pal Marlys is a lesbian and flees in horror is embarrassingly retro. But every time I get to the book’s end—which makes up in irreverence what it lacks in moralism and, for good measure, explains why nurses used to boil water in delivery rooms—I wonder whether The Book of Phoebe could be published today. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But I’d like to think it could, and that it could mark a young girl as indelibly as it once marked me.