We were just reading this blurb on Portland’s Reading Local about All the Pretty People: Tales of Carob Shame & Barbie-Envy (Microcosm Publishing), Portland author Ariel Gore’s new memoir about growing up hippie. It reminded us of another recent memoir by East Coaster Melissa Coleman. Hers, This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres and a Family Undone (Harper), about growing up with back-to-the-land parents in remote Coastal Maine, has something sadder at it’s core, as the subtitle suggests. It’s reviewed mostly glowingly here at the New York Times, and the reviewer mercifully avoids a spoiler, leaving you no choice but to read the book. These two also reminded us of Eugenean Melissa Hart’s recent quirky memoir, Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal Press), about growing up in two worlds in California, one with her button-down father in Manhattan Beach and another with her bohemian lesbian mother in Oxnard. Reading it will put you in the mind of the long-haired girl on the cover—riding a banana-seated bike in the fading summer light. And, actually, all three memoirs’ covers feature grainy photos of groovy 70’s pre-Louv kids.
Makes us wonder what the children of Gen X’s hipsters will be writing about.
