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Tomorrow, I am headed to the beach. I am looking forward to a little bit of reading time, so that I can tackle the three books listed on the top right of this page. I am hoping that I will have Internet access and can post on the blog a few times while I am gone, but if I don’t, please stay tuned, and I will start posting again when I return.
Here’s one last book before I head out. It’s called Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s, by Margaret Sartor, and I first read about it in More magazine. The magazine’s brief description: "American adolescence, 70s style, is explored in this quirky coming of age memoir culled from diary and notebook entries and letters." From Amazon:
Beginning in 1972, at age 13, Sartor records the highlights and low points of her formative years in Montgomery, Ala. Through succinct diary entries that grow more insightful as she ages, the author, who teaches documentary studies at Duke, reveals her insecurities, spiritual awakening and early sexual encounters. Hers is a very normal American childhood, though a few things stand out: she experiences desegregation firsthand (she’s white, but witnesses racism toward black kids) and is torn between her evangelical Christian community and her sectarian household…. Sartor’s reproduction of her diaries differs from traditional memoirs in its lack of adult interpretation of events, told through the distance of time and wisdom. That may make it unusual, but publishing such generally mediocre diaries feels self-indulgent.
Here is a New York Times review, which calls the memoir "priceless."
Carolyn See of the Washington Post wrote, "Parents should give it to their kids, kids to their parents, girlfriends to their boyfriends. ‘Miss American Pie’ isn’t a portrait of adolescence, it is adolescence, with all the sorrows and yearnings and tenderness that attend that age. It’s our youth served up to us once again on a golden plate."