cover image Playing Catch with My Mother: Coming to Manhood When All the Rules Have Changed

Playing Catch with My Mother: Coming to Manhood When All the Rules Have Changed

Greg Lichtenberg. Bantam Books, $23.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-553-09982-9

Skillful writing rescues this memoir from being just another chronicle of adolescent angst, and a genuine attempt to grapple with what it meant to come of age during the feminist movement of the late 1960s and '70s grounds it in the life of the nation, not just that of the memoirist. Lichtenberg successfully evokes the time when he was growing up in Manhattan with two parents whose marriage was impacted by the women's movement. After a trial separation, his mother and father experimented with a new lifestyle in which both worked and shared the housework. However, Lichtenberg recalls that their fighting continued to escalate until they eventually divorced. As a teenager, he was disturbed both by his father's brutal outbursts and by his mother's feminist consciousness, which, he recalls, sometimes caused him to feel guilty about being male: ""My father had a problem. His problem was being a boy."" Lichtenberg's sexual awakening further confused him, and he perceptively describes how his personal turmoil caused him to deliberately sabotage a relationship with a girl who cared about him. The book ends on a note of earned optimism, with Lichtenberg and his fiancee enjoying the fruits of the often tumultuous revolution in gender roles endured by their parents' generation, ""imagining choices beyond the cruelties of tradition and the shortsightedness of rebellion."" (Apr.)