New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004
Remembering the Sixties, Without an Adult Filter
Martha Tod Dudman currently lives in Northeast Harbor, and was a summer resident of the nearby town of Cranberry Isles while growing up. There are some Maine memories in her new book, Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning. A previous book, Augusta, Gone, was about her daughter’s troubled adolescence. Now Dudman recalls her own turbulent teenaged years. Expecting to Fly begins with a reflection by the author at age 50. She compares today’s disenchanted youth to “some of us” in the sixties and concludes that in trying to understand the attitudes of today’s youth, we can look to our pasts and realize we had our own “wild histories.”
The point of Dudman writing this book seems to be revisiting and remembering all her escapades from ages fifteen to nineteen- the drugs and sex of her adolescence, with whom, where, and when. She gives this recounting a surprisingly warm glow, unshadowed by an adult’s regrets or concerns. Why did she use so many drugs so often? The question is never asked, let alone hinted at. Dudman grew up comfortably upper-middle class in Washington D.C. Her parents were patiently tolerant of her adolescent lifestyle. Dudman tested the limits, but the only hard punishment seemed to be expulsion from her prep school, Madeira, after being busted by the headmistress for pot smoking on campus. Teenaged Martha seemed fearless or clueless about the risks she courted in her increasingly habitual use of substances. Through high school, she got high on marijuana routinely. She freely experimented with pills, not even knowing what she was using. She dropped acid over one hundred times. Her behaviors read as addictive and high-risk. Friends, as well as her parents, confronted her more than once and told her they were worried about her.
It seems Dudman might still wonder what all the fuss was about. But we don’t know what Dudman the adult thinks because Dudman assiduously avoids bringing her adult interpretation to this catalog of her experimentation. Only in the opening chapter is there any retrospection as she describes, “I want to approve of the person I used to be. Even her excesses – the drugs, the cigarettes, the men, the late nights, the craziness – want to believe it somehow made me what I am; not believe…that it was just an impediment, something to forget. So which was it – triumph, exploration, some important journey, or just a big stupid mistake, a total waste of time? Was I brave or was I only stupid and selfish? I still don’t know.” Does Dudman believe those two extremes are the yardstick by which to judge what it all meant, that either her drug use was a good thing with positive outcomes (exploration, important journey) or a bad thing (big stupid mistake, total waste of time)?
Adolescents like issues in black and white, and this way of framing it is true to the book’s attitude of an adolescent mindset. Dudman has chosen not to add an adult sense of shades of gray to the picture. There is, however, one telling sentence in her introduction, where she reflects, “Sometimes I wish I’d done things differently, but I know I can’t change that so I soldier on.”
“Soldiering on” connotes getting by the best one can, toughing it out. Is this part of a coping strategy, to leave one’s adolescence unanalyzed? Dudman’s book offers a quantitative rather than qualitative description. Another book could do it differently, and maybe a future one will.
Tina Cohen writes on Vinalhaven, where she lives part-time.