Download and print this free music for use at protest rallies.
Download and print this free music for use at protest rallies.
A woman recalls coming of age during an eventful era in this memoir.
In her debut work of nonfiction, Smalley relates her own story of growing up in Kansas City in the 1960s and ’70s. The author, a musician and retired urban planner, looks back on her childhood and young adult years as they extended through the upheavals that characterized the times. Her story begins on fairly conventional terms—Smalley enjoyed an ordinary upbringing with friends, TV, and summer camp. She relates her gradual sexual awakening in terms that will strike many older readers as very familiar (her affectionate memories of the “giant leap” in the sexual revolution include reaching “first base,” for instance). When she was old enough, the author moved into her own solo apartment with the help of her brother, Bobby. “We munched and shared worries over Mom’s occasional bouts of depression and our hopefulness over her new job and work buddies,” she writes. “At the sound of his car driving away, I couldn’t believe I was on my own for the first time.” Smalley fills her account with contemporary background details and little moments that ground the narrative in specificity, as when she remembers watching Harry Truman’s funeral on TV with her mother while eating leftovers. She does a smooth, very approachable job of narrating all of this, putting readers squarely in the moment by mentioning “I Got You Babe” playing on the radio or watching the Alfred Hitchcock Hour on TV. She’s effectively dramatic whenever her story touches on the landmark events she experienced, like the news of Roe v. Wade, Watergate, or the Vietnam War: “From Vietnam were gut-wrenching televised images from a dusty road of a young Vietnamese girl running naked, screaming from her skin charred from U.S. dropped napalm,” she writes. “Nothing compared to that.”
A richly textured series of memories of a tumultuous time.