Word: maynard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...JOYCE MAYNARD and I were born within four weeks of each other in the winter of 1953, which makes me, chronologically at least, a member of the disenchanted, precocious, Pepsigone-flat generation she writes about and passes herself off as representing. It is true that the two of us had a lot in common. I, too, counted down Friendship-7, agonized with Beaver Cleaver and compared SAT scores. Both of us recall much of our past as photos from Life and the cover of Newsweek. Not surprisingly, many of her recollections -- if not her conclusions -- from growing up in Durham...
...first of her New York Times pieces, "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," brought her national prominence, a rash of wedding proposals, and an extended pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger's Connecticut chicken coop. The article -- which extended is the essence of her book -- also established Maynard as a not-so-reluctant spokeswoman for what she refers to as "my generation...
Being the spokeswoman for a generation is no mean feat. Maynard is careful to point out on the last page of her book that she cannot speak for the blacks, the dropouts or the war orphans. But for the rest of us, the media children for whom "the Beatles and the Kennedys were as close as relatives, some of the memories are national, even universal...
...Maynard remembers a lot, and turning inward for her universal diagnosis, what she remembers best is the urgent futility of the prematurely aging sixties. "If there's a main theme, a single result of our sixties experience, I think it's the idea of growing up old, feeling not disillusionment so much as weariness...
...Many of Maynard's observations on those times, while pleasantly nostalgic, are obvious and trite. "College is not right for everyone," she points out. "The Beatles gave us something more than music." "Why do looks matter so much?" she wants to know. Others, though, are aphoristic and revealing. Somehow, she tells us, she could never imagine Jackie Kennedy going to the bathroom. Abandoning "relevance" to set up a prom, "we knew just enough to feel guilty, like trick-or-treaters nervously passing a ghost with a UNICEF box in his hand...