Looking Back Read Free Page A

person plural in this book—spoke of “my generation” more than I spoke of myself. If there were odd and troubling—and very likely embarrassing—aspects to my experience, I kept those hidden, out of fear that to do otherwise would invoke judgment and disapproval in a reader and shame in my own self.
    This is why, in the 160 pages of Looking Back , no mention can be found of the fact that I grew up in an alcoholic family—though my father’s nightly drinking was a central and formative part of my growing up and one I now understand I shared with so many of the very people at my school, and beyond, from whom I worked so hard to keep this hidden.
    I spoke, in my book, about obsession with looks and body image, but only in the abstract, as if I were an anthropologist. In truth, the girl who wrote Looking Back lived in terror of gaining weight, stepped on the scale several times a day, and regularly made herself throw up (a skill taught to her by the man she loved). In a visit with the editors of a major national magazine that same year, I suggested that they assign me an article on the topic of bulimia, but was told by the editor-in-chief that this sounded way obscure and bizarre for a general audience. Ten years later, Karen Carpenter—whose voice provided the soundtrack to a thousand senior proms and weddings of the day—was dead of anorexia.
    At 18, I couldn’t write about my difficult relationship with my mother, or the struggles between my sister and me, or the fact that my best friend at college had struggled with the knowledge that he was gay. I didn’t write about the social studies teacher at my high school who invited one of my best friends to move in with him during her junior year (and she did, though she never get over the habit of addressing him by the title “Mr.”). Nor did I write about the relatively common practice at my Ivy League college, in those days, for young girls (including my roommate) to get together with their graduate student teaching assistants and, on occasion, their professors—or the fact that when it happened, nobody seemed to view this as a problem. If anything, a relationship with an older person (as modeled by Mia Farrow with Frank Sinatra, and Margaret Trudeau with the Prime Minister of Canada) demonstrated a girl’s sophistication, success, and desirability.
    Most strikingly absent, of course, from my 1972 account of my young life, is any mention of the first love affair I ever had, embarked upon, as an 18-year-old virgin, in the summer after the publication of that article in the New York Times. I do not say, in the book that purports to be the story of my life to date, that I have dropped out of college (never to return, though I didn’t know this yet) and moved in with a man 35 years older than I am. I do not say this man is J. D. Salinger.
    Only one small clue exists in the pages of the book you are holding in your hand, suggesting what was actually going on in my private life at the time I was writing it. It appears on the second-to-last page of Looking Back , in the final chapter, that I wrote on the morning of January 1, 1973—which happened to be Jerry Salinger’s 54th birthday. I don’t say that it was his birthday, but I refer to having rung in the New Year “with popcorn and Guy Lombardo.” Talk about extinct phenomena: The only people watching the band leader Guy Lombardo on New Year’s Eve were people over 50, probably. But I was living with one of them and being the girl I was then, I listened to the music he liked and kept my Johnny Cash and Rolling Stones albums in the closet.
    I kept a lot of my truest self hidden there too.
    Certain parts of this book—the sense of the narrator as a perpetual outsider, sitting on the sidelines at every party she attended, watching everyone else get drunk, or stoned, or fall in love, while she herself kept scribbling on that infernal legal pad—strike me now as familiar, and touching, and sad. Sometimes the voice