cover image EXPECTING TO FLY: A Sixties Reckoning

EXPECTING TO FLY: A Sixties Reckoning

Martha Tod Dudman, . . Simon & Schuster, $23 (243pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-4773-3

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. Agent, Betsy Lerner. (Mar. 1)