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Adult Books - Nonfiction - History - U.S. History
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Notes from Nethers: Growing Up in a Sixties Commune.
Eugster, Sandra (author).
Oct. 2007. Academy Chicago, paperback, $18.95 (9780897335614). 975.5.
REVIEW.
First published October 15, 2007 (Booklist).
On the same day in 1969 that Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Eugster’s mother moved her three daughters from Baltimore to rural Virginia, where she set up a commune. “We might as well have been on a spacecraft ourselves,” writes Eugster, who was nine at the time. In this probing, intimate memoir, Eugster recounts the challenges of growing up in an environment where “the margin between freedom and endangerment is slim.” The work is hard, the education unfocused, the awareness of adult sexuality comes too early, and reentry into the conventional world, as a college freshman, is bewildering: “How do you talk to people? How do you shave your armpits and legs? . . . Where do you buy bras?” But Eugster, now a psychologist, also writes with deep tenderness about her family, the skills and strength she gained from her exceptional youth, and the shifting relationship between parents and maturing children. Like Tim Guest’s My Life in Orange (2005), this is a fascinating, evenhanded view of counterculture life in the 1970s.— Gillian Engberg
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