Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1257379 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As middle-aged Dudman (Augusta, Gone) watches a cluster of rebellious teenagers sitting on a bench in her Maine town, she finds herself wondering what happened to her own crazy youth. How did she become an adult, married woman, "cutting out coupons for the Shop 'n Save" after spending much of the late 1960s looking for sex, smoking marijuana and dropping LSD? Raised in an upper-class Washington, D.C., family, Dudman attended the elite Madeira School, where all her friends had famous fathers and were "raised to be something." But Dudman had more pressing items on her agenda, like figuring out boys and sex and getting rid of her virginity. Volunteering to work for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968, Dudman left home and met a variety of willing boys. Once the sex hurdle was over, she was able to relax and drift from light pot-smoking to serious acid-tripping. From there, she moved on to Antioch College and pursued a fuller hippie lifestyle. In time, the whole scene-acid, back-to-the-earth communes, bumming around Europe-became more trouble than it was worth. Dudman yearned for a life that wasn't so "confusing." There was much she still didn't understand, but she could at least accept that "there's a lot between who I am, who I always thought I would be, and what I will eventually become-and that somehow all those people are the same." Dudman's willingness to admit she didn't figure everything out and her kindness toward her old reckless self make this account of her woollier years surprisingly endearing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Author of the acclaimed memoir Augusta, Gone (2000), about her daughter's turbulent adolescence, Dudman here recounts her own wild years. Ensconced in Northeast Harbor, Maine, baking bread and cutting out coupons, Dudman looks back at her risk-taking high-school and college years with a certain amount of alarm. In the chapters that follow, Dudman attempts to channel her teenage self and is unnervingly, uncomfortably effective at doing so. Tracing in aching detail her feelings of alienation--her inability to feel comfortable with the opposite sex, with her own body, with her chaotic emotions--she turns to drugs. Tripping on windowpane for days at a time, engaging in a series of embarrassing, disheartening one-night stands, she alarms her family and friends. Then her first serious boyfriend gives her some stability, and a family crisis provides a newfound appreciation for the fragility of life. Dudman shares more personal information than many readers might need or want, yet she manages to create a realistic, emotionally jittery portrait of teenage desperation masquerading as reckless bravado. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning
Dudman strikes a universal theme in Expecting to Fly, capturing the wonderlust and uncertainty of youth. Dudman's excellent writing makes this book hard to put down.

Not worth it
Yet another book full of whining, navel-gazing, self-centered Boomer pap...when are publishers going to quit churning this stuff out? A spiritual journey from Nowhere to Nowhere, boringly recounted. Omit.

time travel
I love Dudman's clear focused writing, and I was curious whether she'd be able to successfully re-create such a turbulent, unfocused time. She did it. With her terse, vibrant words, she sucked me back thirty-five years into my old skin, or rather, my young skin and allowed me to re-live those painful, sometimes wonderful, self aware years. Interestingly, I found myself relating as much to her parents as I did to Martha. I'm not a kid anymore, although I surely once was, but now, I am a parent too. Consequently, the book flung me headlong into an out of body experience, and I found myself mentally rushing back and forth between Martha and her parents hoping to mediate. Of course, we know the futility of interrupting a rite of passage. However, when Martha extended her hand through time and actually tried to touch her former self, I felt validation, and knew that somehow, thanks to gravity, thanks to time, thanks to the rite of shedding old skins, things would eventually be ok. And they were, and they are.