Looking Back

To My Parents

A 58-Year-Old Looks Back on
Looking Back

Before

1962

1963

1965

1966

1969

1972

1973

I
N THE FALL OF
1971, while in my freshman year at Yale University, I sent a letter to the managing editor of the
New York Times
, suggesting that I write an article for him. I did not know this man, and he knew nothing of me—and in the years since I have recognized the oddness of my suggestion. But at the time, writing that letter seemed like a fairly normal thing to do. Maybe I’d get a negative response, and maybe none at all. But in this respect, at least, I felt a surprising amount of ease and self-assurance. If a person wanted to write an article for the greatest newspaper in America, what better way to make that happen than to ask?

My boldness did not extend beyond the page. Until that September I had lived my whole life in a small New Hampshire town, where I had always felt more than a little like an outsider. Never a social disaster, exactly: I was secretary of my eighth grade class, and chairman of the decorations committee of my junior prom; I won the roles of Lady Macbeth and one of the aunts in
Arsenic and Old Lace
in Drama Club. I never viewed myself as remotely normal, though I longed to be perceived that way. I studied the actions of the popular kids—and the characters on television shows, particularly family situation comedies—to pick up tips on how I might accomplish that. While other kids in my school played sports and went on dates—made friends, attended church, learned how to ski, and later smoked pot and had sex—I spent my time writing stories on yellow legal pads and typing them on a Smith Corona portable. (To any reader born after the year 1980 or so, I will add here: that was a brand of typewriter. Now extinct.)

I was a naïve girl, and in many ways, young for my age. For me, the typewriter—and what I produced on it—provided my best connection to the world. That, and acting in plays, and listening to music. The first thing I’d bought with my babysitting money, in seventh grade, was a portable record player housed in a bright red Samsonite case. Then I joined the Columbia Record and Tape Club, to take advantage of their offer of ten albums for a penny. My inaugural purchases:
Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison.
The first Joni Mitchell album.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
. A comedy album called
The Sex Life of the Primate.
Also the Rolling Stones.

Music inspired me to think about the world, and want to change it. After I heard Pete Seeger, around age ten, I felt ready to devote my life to making the ideals of peace and harmony expressed in “We Shall Overcome” come true. I’d travelled by bus to Boston to see Joan Baez, and sat in the front row at the ice arena in our town when Janis Joplin performed there. After I got home, the first thing I did was write a story about it. There was that typewriter again—my instrument, though I might have preferred the guitar.

My parents always encouraged my writing. Nearly every night, in our family living room, I’d read my stories out loud to the two of them, and they would offer comments and suggestions. No pats on the head or suggestions to keep up the good work, however. The criticism was extreme. The standard simple: excellence.

I learned a lot in that living room. Since age fourteen I’d published my writing in magazines, chiefly
Seventeen.
This didn’t make me popular, or provide the sense of belonging I hungered for, but it allowed me to feel acknowledged and heard. For a small-town girl who could never have earned a place on the one team her school made available for girls—cheerleading—this was a rare and precious thing. It also allowed me to give my mother—a brilliant woman in her own right, who’d overcome the challenge of her immigrant parents’ poverty to earn a PhD from Harvard, only to find her career aspirations stifled by her role as a wife and mother in the fifties—the opportunity to shine in the reflected glory of her child’s successes. I cannot remember a time I was too young to recognize the longing to lay success at my mother’s feet and earn, for her, the recognition that had eluded her in her own young years.

It was a collection of clippings from these magazine stories of mine—a short story I’d written about a car accident that had killed four boys in my high school the year before, and an article about the Miss Teenage America pageant I’d attended (strictly as observer, not contestant)—that I’d included with my letter to the
New York Times
editor, as examples of my writing. He wrote back and said OK, he’d assign me a story. I was not all that surprised by this. It made sense at the time.

As for my assignment: There was only one topic about which I could have been called any kind of expert, and it was this one he asked me to explore.
Myself.

“We’d like you to write about what it was like growing up in the sixties,” the
Times
editor told me in the letter that arrived in response to the one I’d sent to him a few weeks before. “Tell how the times you came of age shaped your idea of the world ahead of you. Write about your generation, and how you see the future.”

My generation
. What did I know of how other 18-year-olds lived—the normal ones, those cool and self-assured-looking types who had their lives all figured out (or so I imagined) as I did not? I fit in about the same at college as I had in high school: not very well. At the time I didn’t have a clue how many other people my age there were—boys as well as girls, including even those very cool types I studied closely—who felt much the same as I did.

At the time, the only place where I felt truly safe and comfortable was my old bedroom back in the house where I’d grown up. So a few days after receiving my assignment from the
New York Times
, I made my way over to the spot in New Haven where cars got on the highway and I stuck my thumb out. Even as I was embarking on writing the article about my bold and supposedly anarchic generation, the place I chose to write it was my childhood bedroom, with my parents close by to advise.

So many things were different in those days and the prevalence of hitchhiking as a means of getting around was one. Even in 1971, however, the idea of an 18-year-old girl heading north on Route 95, by herself, on a rapidly darkening Friday afternoon, for a roughly 200-mile journey to New Hampshire, would have been viewed by most people as questionable if not outright dangerous. I was an odd girl, though—as, later, I no doubt became an odd woman. There were things that scared me—things that seemed easy and unthreatening to other girls my age—like calling up a boy to ask for a homework assignment, or getting on a chair lift, or walking into the Yale dining hall and finding a spot to set down my tray. But the idea of getting into the car of a stranger (often a man) and heading out onto the highway with him, alone, seemed not to alarm me.

It was this same odd mix of fearfulness and self-confidence, sophistication and naïveté, that no doubt explained my ability to present myself to the
New York Times
as a writer worthy of consideration for an assignment—and later allowed me to write about a phenomenon I termed “the embarrassment of virginity”—while remaining unable to walk into a drugstore and buy a box of tampons, or look a boy in the eye when I spoke to him. At age 18, I was afraid of many things I didn’t need to fear. And unafraid of other things that, had I been wiser, should have terrified me.

I wrote my article for the
New York Times
that weekend, back home in New Hampshire—read it out loud to my parents, as I always did with my work, for their suggestions and critique—and after correcting the spelling errors, delivered it, by a method not far from the typewriter in line for extinction: the US mail.

Shortly after that the call came: My article would be running in the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
. A photographer had been assigned to come to the Yale campus a few days later, for the purpose of photographing me.

I wore my blue jeans for that shot, and a pair of red-and-white checked sneakers, and an old grey sweater that only partially concealed how thin I was at the time: 96 pounds. I always knew the exact number, in those days, and never let it get above 100 without cutting out food altogether. (That, too, represented strange behavior, though in this way at least, I remained representative of a significant number of girls at my university, and many other places too.)

My article—bearing the headline “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” (the irony of which escaped me at the time)—was published on April 23, 1972. It’s a date I know well because in so many ways my life changed that day.

It’s impossible to convey to a reader of a subsequent generation how much impact the appearance of a single magazine article could have on a young writer’s career back then. Starting with that photograph of me in my jeans. Not beautiful, certainly—nobody could have mistaken me for a model. But there was this look on my face of amusement and hopefulness. I was a girl just starting off on her adventures and whatever my words might have suggested, with their tone of affected weariness, the openness of my expression showed someone who believed what people told her, had faith that life was good. I was not simply eager but hungry to experience the world.

These days, there are so many places to go for images and news and information, so many words and pictures competing for public consumption, it’s unlikely that any one piece of media—with the exception of a viral video, maybe—could become the focus of so much attention, all on a single day. But in 1972, far fewer outlets existed for a person’s voice, so when you made your way into one of them, as I did that day, people took notice in a big way. I acquired the label of “spokesperson for her generation.”

Within two days of the publication of that article, three enormous sacks of mail were delivered to my dormitory room. Inside were hundreds of letters—close to a thousand—from all over the country. Many were from people my age. Some had liked that article a lot, they told me; others—many—were angry about something or other I’d said in it. Many young readers took exception to my somewhat goody-goody position on drugs—I was against them—and the apparent prudishness of my comments about people my age having sex. (Those attitudes failed to conceal the deeper truth: My biggest problem with sex at the time lay in my own failure to locate a boyfriend.) Then there was the view—justifiably voiced by many—“Who do you think you are, to speak for ‘our generation’?”

Mixed in with those letters—and easily identifiable by the important-looking envelopes they arrived in—were all kinds of professional offers: magazine editors and book editors wanting to meet with me, and radio producers and television producers suggesting that I might have a career in broadcasting, and one invitation, from a casting director, to audition for a movie. As a girl who loved to act, and sought out the stage at every opportunity, this one inspired particular excitement. The movie was
The Exorcist
, and I did audition, though it was a girl named Linda Blair who got the role.