Synopsis
He was a rabble-rousing New York high school senior. She was a fiercely proud daughter of the Deep South. In 1969 these two strangers exchanged angry letters, igniting a lifetime friendship and an extraordinary personal chronicle of our times.
She was a conservative Mississippi girl. He was a self-styled firebrand from New York. In 1969, in an America torn apart by differences, two very dissimilar teens put their hearts on paper and began a friendship that would span thirty years. Now, in this collaborative memoir, they tell an unforgettable story that is a testament to who we were yesterday... and who we are now.
It began when a group of bored Long Island high school newspaper reporters wrote, for a lark, an obnoxious note to Ruth Tuttle, the editor of a Deep South school paper. The New York teens included a future documentary filmmaker, a concert violinist, and the founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream--but in those days they were typical high school seniors, quick to imagine they knew all about a girl they'd never met.
The ringleader, Jeff Durstewitz, impulsively dropped the letter into a mailbox, never suspecting that within a few days he'd receive an electrifying response. In the following flurry of letters, genteelly Southern Ruth and brash Jeff explored their feelings--sometimes heatedly--about God, race, sex, and life. Within a month of receiving Ruth's first letter, Jeff was planning a Yankee invasion of Yazoo City, Mississippi.
Spring break brought a wild drive from New York to Yazoo City with his two friends in a psychedelic VW Bug, a "Heat of the Night" encounter between a cop and these three headstrong teens, and a culture clash in Ruth's living room that neither she nor her proper parents would ever forget. It was a night that shattered stereotypes--and their hopes for a romance.
But it didn't derail the long-distance friendship that would sustain them both through thirty years of love affairs, heartbreaking disappointments, social change, divorce, and the loss of a cherished friend as they negotiated the passages from youth to middle age. And with each move, the packet of precious letters traveled, too.
These letters form the heart of a wonderful memoir that captures not just the hopes of a generation and the soul of the South on the brink of inexorable change, but the experience of being young, bright, and passionate.
Younger Than That Now is as achingly expressive as Janis Joplin singing "Me and Bobby McGee," as revealing of youth's wild yearnings as a Woodstock documentary. It is sharp, funny, and true, a mirror for a generation--both then and now.
From the Back Cover
"Younger Than That Now is the most honest, compelling book I've ever read about the 1960s generation and its coming to maturity. Fresh, moving, funny, and incisive, it encompasses many very American things: the differences and mutualities in the North and South, ambitions, defeats, and loves, and the passing of time itself across a broad national landscape."
--Willie Morris, author of North Toward Home, My Dog Skip, New York Days, and The Ghost of Medgar Evers and editor in chief of Harper's Magazine, 1967-1971
"A story of friendship, carefully and lovingly tracked down the years, this book is by turns sad and happy. It moves and it touches.... For anyone who came of age in the late '60s, and survived to tell the tale, this is essential reading."
--Campbell Black, author of Raiders of the Lost Ark: A Novel
"Younger Than That Now took me back abruptly to the sixties and seventies when my sons and their friends (and parents, too) were grappling with the upheavals and tragedies of Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement. The passage of time has blurred and thrown shadows over all those crises, that anguish--the courage and hope and naivete and illusion and foolishness that we all to some degree participated in. Younger Than That Now brings that time vividly back to life. It rings with authenticity."
--Ellen Douglas, author of Can't Quit You, Baby
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