[.ca] Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning (ISBN 0743247736)

Amazon.com Review:
The tumult of the '60s provides a dramatic backdrop for Martha Tod Dudman's candid memoir of her misspent youth. For Dudman, the gathering of her experiences as a rebellious, insolent, and aimless teen and young woman must have been a particularly wrenching process--her earlier memoir, Augusta, Gone, chronicled the trials she faced dealing with her daughter's troubled adolescence. In Expecting to Fly, Dudman switches roles and turns back the clock to a time when she experimented with drugs, casual (albeit emotionally taxing) sex, and counterculture lifestyles (she finds herself grimly clearing land and planting onions at a communal farm in West Virginia). Shifting from past to present tense, judiciously inserting brief steam-of-consciousness flashbacks, and sticking to clipped, unfussy prose, Dudman creates a terse but vivid portrait of a confused girl who's world is a swirl of idealism and apathy, independence and neediness, fearlessness and fear. --Steven Stolder

time travel:
I love Dudman's clear focused writing, and I was curious whether she'd be able to successfully re-create such a turbulent, unfocused time. She did it. With her terse, vibrant words, she sucked me back thirty-five years into my old skin, or rather, my young skin and allowed me to re-live those painful, sometimes wonderful, self aware years. Interestingly, I found myself relating as much to her parents as I did to Martha. I'm not a kid anymore, although I surely once was, but now, I am a parent too. Consequently, the book flung me headlong into an out of body experience, and I found myself mentally rushing back and forth between Martha and her parents hoping to mediate. Of course, we know the futility of interrupting a rite of passage. However, when Martha extended her hand through time and actually tried to touch her former self, I felt validation, and knew that somehow, thanks to gravity, thanks to time, thanks to the rite of shedding old skins, things would eventually be ok. And they were, and they are.

Not worth it:
Yet another book full of whining, navel-gazing, self-centered Boomer pap...when are publishers going to quit churning this stuff out? A spiritual journey from Nowhere to Nowhere, boringly recounted. Omit.

Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning:
Dudman strikes a universal theme in Expecting to Fly, capturing the wonderlust and uncertainty of youth. Dudman's excellent writing makes this book hard to put down.

Expected to Enjoy:
...but I didn't. The prose often sounds like it came straight from a writing course, sometimes woefully artsy and very mannered. Repeated words embedded within terse sentences and one-word objective correlatives, followed by Faulkneresque run-ons sounded contrived and disingenuous. However, there's humor and pathos, and some recognizable period detail (especially if you're from the East Coast) that's appetizing. It's just one person's "sixties reckoning," of course, and obviously it won't always be the same as your own. An admirable attempt to reconcile past and present, the book would have had more power if the writing didn't get in the way. Just a personal opinion, others may enjoy her writerly style.

Interesting & Refreshing:
As a child of the 80's, I found it interesting to read about the 60's. As a person who, like many people, survived an adolescence of substance and sexual experimentation and a longing to find myself and belong, I found it very refreshing. Pressures of growing up aren't isolated to "my generation." They are an age-old phenomenon, albeit slightly altered to the decade of coming-of-age. I loved this book and passed it on to friends who also loved it. I found the narratives about LSD were particularly great since it's something so hard to describe to others who have never done it. She hits the nail on the head and made me really remember what it felt like!