By Susan Jane Gilman
Warner Books
Paperback

This is a memoir like no other. From being a child of hippie parents to becoming an adult today, Susan Jane Gilman tells the ‘not so usual’ coming of age story.

Where most books portray coming of age in the teen years, Gilman takes it a step further - the true coming of age into adulthood. The story begins in 1969 as Gilman’s family was living in subsidized housing in Upper Manhattan where crimes and gang activity were rampant. She tells us of their vacation in Silver Lake where this city girl can experience nature like she’d never seen.

Gilman speaks about her own insecurities and the desire to be liked and accepted. These desires didn’t just appear when she hit adolescence. She show us these desires throughout her life as she brags about being in a movie at age four, changes her name to Sapphire and creates tall tales for show and tell in kindergarten, practices endlessly for the starring role in the school play and even as she vies for attention from boys and eventually men.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Excerpt Today if I were to write this as a short story, this comment would provide the obvious moment of epiphany: A young girl, whose sexuality is just being awakened, fantasizes about a rock 'n' roll star. She dreams that one day they'll meet, and that he will find her desirable. Then, miraculously, she has dinner with him. But instead of being the charming man she dreamed he would be, he humiliates her, making lewd comments about her body in front of the other guests. When he says these things, she suddenly realizes that the man she has idolized for so long is in fact vulgar and arrogant. The eventmarks the beginning of her disillusionment, the end of her innocence, the start of her true coming of age. ©2005 Susan Jane Gilman Published with permission from Warner Books

She carries us through her changing body as she grows from child to woman and the reality of graduating from college and discovering the hiring managers of the world weren’t exactly holding their breath waiting for her to graduate.

But the story and possibly Gilman’s life to a certain extent, took on a different meaning when she was assigned to do a story about a group of teenagers visiting the concentration camps in Germany. Technically Jewish, but not devout or exclusive, she gets serious at this point in the book and seeing the remnants of the people that lost their lives at the camps through the eyes of Gilman as an adult and through the eyes of the teenagers who were there with her created a sort of generation gap and bridge at the same time.

After Gilman left the Jewish paper, she took on freelance jobs and eventually landed in Washington, DC. Her take on the government is a must for all to read. Her parents divorce after she becomes an adult and her range of emotions are as strong as if she were still a child. She also tells us about her wedding and her desire for it to be as untraditional as possible.

Since she’s a self-described feminist of now-divorced parents, the untraditional part is way over the top especially when she finds that her mind may be nonconformist but her body is built for tradition. But her life doesn’t end at marriage, that’s when her European period begins…

Bookworm's Briefing
Anyone born in the sixties will relate to this story. Gilman proves we all face many of the same choices whether we grow up in the city or the country, feminist or not. We're all women and that's our common bond.