Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties by Joyce Maynard

Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties by Joyce Maynard. Avon Books. 186 pages. 1972

Beginning the book review/discussion portion of Project 1968 with Joyce Maynard’s book feels natural. After all, like Janine, Joyce was a self-aware young woman writing about her time. Her observations of life, from 1953 to 1973 cut against the grain of popular thought.

For example, on smoking pot:
“The psychological releases that supposedly come from the use of dope – the heightened perceptions, new sounds, (“You haven’t really heard Beethoven until you’ve listened to him stoned”), the “far-out” colors – they all seem too easily come by to be deserved, to be true. It’s unacceptable to me that mental and spiritual “enlightenment may be bought for the price of an ounce of marijuana, and that a simple physical act like lighting up a joint and inhaling (no skill required there) should equip one to listen to the Ninth Symphony with a richness and amplitude that Beethoven himself never enjoyed.” (pp. 135)

On feminism:
“I do not feel inferior or unliberated, and while I recognize that there are women who do, women (for whom the movement does a great service) whose image of themselves needs to be changed, and that even those of us who feel equal to men may not get the equal treatment, the truth is that the methods of the feminist movement turn me off.” (pp 150)

I can’t imagine that these views made Maynard the most popular girl on campus. Nonetheless, she wields words with breathtaking integrity. I have no doubt that even back in the early ‘70s, there was a group of women her age who were caught between angry radicals and the Silent Majority. Rather than being caught up in the cultural zeitgeist, Maynard and others sought to make a path uniquely their own.

When I first discovered "Looking Back" at the book dealer, I held off buying it. The only thing I knew about Maynard was the J.D. Salinger thing: Around the time she was writing "Looking Back," Salinger took her under his wing and they became lovers. She was 19 at the time, and an already an accomplished writer.

But that’s not the reason for my initial hesitation. There’s a strain that runs through the “wise youth perspective” paperbacks from the 1960s, that of the tired know-it-all. Maynard’s book, in fact, is subtitled: “A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties.” Being tired of the “arrogant youth” paradigm, I stared at that book for several months during my visits to the book dealer. Finally giving in to curiosity, or maybe it was just my own sense of wanting to be thorough, I bought the book.

I was pleasantly surprised.

The quality of her writing is astounding, as well as the depth through which she looked at her life. While other personal statements from the time period reek of egotism, her lens is free from such entanglements.

The other striking quality is how well the book stands over time. Her thoughts about society, relationships and even drugs are still valid today. In fact, I would say that the Joyce Maynard who wrote this book might have more in common with today’s teens than she did with her own generation.

There have been times since reading the book when I’ve wondered what it was that made me hesitate to buy it. Did I dismiss it because I thought the views of a 19-year-old girl would be shallow? Did I wonder what the girl on the cover could possibly know about life?

I can’t deny it. I’ve long subscribed to the same view that Maynard exposed in the book: I didn’t want to be the angry feminist, the one who constantly talked about how women were viewed as lacking depth. Since the ‘90s, I’ve viewed feminists with caution. Their tireless defense of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky matter reeked of hypocrisy. Very few took the time to identify with Lewinsky, except to express disgust for the media creation she became.

In the late ‘90s, Maynard was viciously castigated for auctioning off love letters sent to her by J.D. Salinger. Comparing her with Lewinski, Maureen Dowd attacked both in print for “living off the blood of old lovers.”

Harsh criticism, perhaps. But I get the feeling that someday down the road, the late ‘90s will be viewed as the unfortunate time when women sold out other women in the name of liberalism.