Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning Book

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.

Now, years later, Dudman reflects on that time and what it means: "Which was it -- triumph, exploration, some important journey, or just a big stupid mistake, a total waste of time?"

You decide.

The New York Times

[Dudman] is candid and even amusing about her general obliviousness to the wider world in those days. But it is clear that she now writes as someone keenly aware of how her actions appear in hindsight. Ms. Dudman eventually discovered, by way of Haight-Ashbury and other detours, that she would rather not spend her life in a daze. — Janet Maslin