Looking Back Read Free Page B

of the girl I was comes across as funny and wise, and sometimes terribly young. Her observations can be perceptive and compassionate—when she speaks about the power of Seventeen magazine to shape girls’ sense of themselves and their sense of who they should be, the fear of death, and the social structures of junior high.
    As strongly as I did when I was 18, I can feel the humiliations described in these pages of a boy at my school (I remember him vividly still) whose voice never fully changed, so every time he spoke in class (and this happened with less and less frequency) you never knew what octave he’d be speaking in. (Years later, I heard he had committed suicide. No doubt there were other problems, and plenty of them, that accounted for this. Still I am struck—reading my description of him all those years before—by my recognition of how cruel the world can be, and was, to people who were different. And my own way of addressing that, which was to keep safely under wraps the evidence of my own greatest sources of discomfort and shame.)
    There are times here where my assessments of my life, growing up in the sixties, strike me as overly grandiose and sweeping, for sure. There are also some moments in these pages when my 18-year-old self captured something that feels, all these years later, like truth—and sometimes, oddly enough, what I say shows less in the way of how much things have changed than it does how much has stayed the same. That happens when the voice of the narrator—me, at 18—writes of being “worldly not from seeing the world, but from watching it on television.” And when I speak of my television-occupied world as “a visual glut” that served to deaden the senses to the point where hardly anything seemed amazing or wonderful any more.
    I can muster affection and sympathy for this girl who was me—for her yearnings for religion, her admission that sometimes she changes her outfit nine times before going out, her willingness to admit she doesn’t smoke marijuana and have sex. (Though she slips into the third person when she starts talking about this. First person is just too close to the bone.) But at other times—mostly when making pronouncements about youth and “my generation” she is maddening, to the point where I want to shake her.
    “You think you know so much,” I would tell my young self. “ Just wait. ”
    I remember a conversation I had many years later with my own daughter, when she was about the same age and came home to visit after her first semester at college. She had been taking a course called “Introduction to Feminism” taught by a famous former Berkeley radical, and she was exploding with ideas and opinions not yet fully supported by life experience. “Oh, Mama,” she said to me—weighing in on a decision I’d made that struck her as evidence of my lack of enlightenment concerning the female condition—“ you have no idea what women have gone through. ”
    Here is some of what I did not know at 18 about what women go through, as they pass beyond their teens and into their twenties, and beyond that to the thirties, and the forties, to the age I own as I write this now: 58.
    I didn’t know that my parents, the people to whom I dedicated Looking Back , and the home I’d lived in for all my growing-up years—the place I’d hitchhiked back to from New Haven for the purpose of writing my article because it had seemed to me like the one safe spot on earth—would break apart within months of finishing my book. Within twelve months my parents had divorced—with great anger and bitterness, brought on in no small part by the presence in my father’s life of a young girlfriend, only a few years older than I was.
    The war in Vietnam ended around the time Looking Back was published. Nixon resigned. The soldiers came home. “The boys of 1953, my year, will be the last to go,” I’d written in my book. I didn’t know how many among that generation of young men