Welcome to Litsy!

Kind of an odd book. Boylen isn't that much older than me, but grew up in such a different world, it's hard to make sense of all the pieces of her memoir put together. I found myself questioning, “is this real?“ a lot. But she has a dry, Vonnegut-esque sense of humor, and there's an underlying poignancy that touched me very much. It's interesting as sort of a period piece and heartbreaking as a story about family.

In those days, my friends and I listened to everything--classical, traditional Irish, Javanese gamelan, cool jazz, Indian raga, Frank Zappa, Gregorian chants, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The only thing completely off our radar was disco, which we assumed appealed exclusively to the stupid. Inevitably, it's disco that people now associate with the era of my adolescence.