Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2303715 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-24
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
The tumult of the '60s provides a dramatic backdrop for Martha Tod Dudman's candid memoir of her misspent youth. For Dudman, the gathering of her experiences as a rebellious, insolent, and aimless teen and young woman must have been a particularly wrenching process--her earlier memoir, Augusta, Gone, chronicled the trials she faced dealing with her daughter's troubled adolescence. In Expecting to Fly, Dudman switches roles and turns back the clock to a time when she experimented with drugs, casual (albeit emotionally taxing) sex, and counterculture lifestyles (she finds herself grimly clearing land and planting onions at a communal farm in West Virginia). Shifting from past to present tense, judiciously inserting brief steam-of-consciousness flashbacks, and sticking to clipped, unfussy prose, Dudman creates a terse but vivid portrait of a confused girl who's world is a swirl of idealism and apathy, independence and neediness, fearlessness and fear. --Steven Stolder

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Author of the acclaimed memoir Augusta, Gone (2000), about her daughter's turbulent adolescence, Dudman here recounts her own wild years. Ensconced in Northeast Harbor, Maine, baking bread and cutting out coupons, Dudman looks back at her risk-taking high-school and college years with a certain amount of alarm. In the chapters that follow, Dudman attempts to channel her teenage self and is unnervingly, uncomfortably effective at doing so. Tracing in aching detail her feelings of alienation--her inability to feel comfortable with the opposite sex, with her own body, with her chaotic emotions--she turns to drugs. Tripping on windowpane for days at a time, engaging in a series of embarrassing, disheartening one-night stands, she alarms her family and friends. Then her first serious boyfriend gives her some stability, and a family crisis provides a newfound appreciation for the fragility of life. Dudman shares more personal information than many readers might need or want, yet she manages to create a realistic, emotionally jittery portrait of teenage desperation masquerading as reckless bravado. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

time travel
I love Dudman's clear focused writing, and I was curious whether she'd be able to successfully re-create such a turbulent, unfocused time. She did it. With her terse, vibrant words, she sucked me back thirty-five years into my old skin, or rather, my young skin and allowed me to re-live those painful, sometimes wonderful, self aware years. Interestingly, I found myself relating as much to her parents as I did to Martha. I'm not a kid anymore, although I surely once was, but now, I am a parent too. Consequently, the book flung me headlong into an out of body experience, and I found myself mentally rushing back and forth between Martha and her parents hoping to mediate. Of course, we know the futility of interrupting a rite of passage. However, when Martha extended her hand through time and actually tried to touch her former self, I felt validation, and knew that somehow, thanks to gravity, thanks to time, thanks to the rite of shedding old skins, things would eventually be ok. And they were, and they are.

Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning
Dudman strikes a universal theme in Expecting to Fly, capturing the wonderlust and uncertainty of youth. Dudman's excellent writing makes this book hard to put down.

Interesting & Refreshing
As a child of the 80's, I found it interesting to read about the 60's. As a person who, like many people, survived an adolescence of substance and sexual experimentation and a longing to find myself and belong, I found it very refreshing. Pressures of growing up aren't isolated to "my generation." They are an age-old phenomenon, albeit slightly altered to the decade of coming-of-age. I loved this book and passed it on to friends who also loved it.

I found the narratives about LSD were particularly great since it's something so hard to describe to others who have never done it. She hits the nail on the head and made me really remember what it felt like!