Synopsis
Do you remember what it felt like to be fifteen? Martha Tod Dudman does.
It starts with a blue hash pipe in a shabby field and a hot, tight dance at the Mayflower Hotel, and rapidly accelerates against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the Sixties.
Describing a time weirdly similar to today, Expecting to Fly recalls a conservative government embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war, racial tensions, and a generation of disillusioned young people looking for something meaningful to believe in - teenagers who, like Dudman, hurled themselves into a sea of drugs and sex they weren't really ready for.
With the same passion and brutal honesty that she brought to her first book, Augusta, Gone - the story of her daughter's troubled adolescence - Dudman re-creates her own wild ride through the turbulent Sixties, vividly recounting scenes you probably experienced yourself.
From the prim tradition of a posh girls' school and debutante parties of Washington, D.C., to the snows of New Hampshire and the campaign for Eugene McCarthy, from living out of a knapsack in Spain to getting stoned on acid in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Expecting to Fly takes us on a blistering trip to a time when the only thing you couldn't be was shocked.
Reviews
As middle-aged Dudman (Augusta, Gone) watches a cluster of rebellious teenagers sitting on a bench in her Maine town, she finds herself wondering what happened to her own crazy youth. How did she become an adult, married woman, "cutting out coupons for the Shop 'n Save" after spending much of the late 1960s looking for sex, smoking marijuana and dropping LSD? Raised in an upper-class Washington, D.C., family, Dudman attended the elite Madeira School, where all her friends had famous fathers and were "raised to be something." But Dudman had more pressing items on her agenda, like figuring out boys and sex and getting rid of her virginity. Volunteering to work for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968, Dudman left home and met a variety of willing boys. Once the sex hurdle was over, she was able to relax and drift from light pot-smoking to serious acid-tripping. From there, she moved on to Antioch College and pursued a fuller hippie lifestyle. In time, the whole scene-acid, back-to-the-earth communes, bumming around Europe-became more trouble than it was worth. Dudman yearned for a life that wasn't so "confusing." There was much she still didn't understand, but she could at least accept that "there's a lot between who I am, who I always thought I would be, and what I will eventually become-and that somehow all those people are the same." Dudman's willingness to admit she didn't figure everything out and her kindness toward her old reckless self make this account of her woollier years surprisingly endearing.
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Author of the acclaimed memoir Augusta, Gone (2000), about her daughter's turbulent adolescence, Dudman here recounts her own wild years. Ensconced in Northeast Harbor, Maine, baking bread and cutting out coupons, Dudman looks back at her risk-taking high-school and college years with a certain amount of alarm. In the chapters that follow, Dudman attempts to channel her teenage self and is unnervingly, uncomfortably effective at doing so. Tracing in aching detail her feelings of alienation--her inability to feel comfortable with the opposite sex, with her own body, with her chaotic emotions--she turns to drugs. Tripping on windowpane for days at a time, engaging in a series of embarrassing, disheartening one-night stands, she alarms her family and friends. Then her first serious boyfriend gives her some stability, and a family crisis provides a newfound appreciation for the fragility of life. Dudman shares more personal information than many readers might need or want, yet she manages to create a realistic, emotionally jittery portrait of teenage desperation masquerading as reckless bravado. Joanne Wilkinson
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