Going Nowhere Sideways
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Going Nowhere Sideways is a Coming of Middle Age story that spans 20 years starting with Woodstock and ending with the demolition of the Berlin Wall. It traces the life of Molly Williams as she searches for her life's purpose. She questions motherhood, the wisdom of unconditional love, her sexuality, the politics of the day, and through journal entries, humorous reflections, and a nervous breakdown, heads into her middle years with the strength and openness to relish life's surprises.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Energetic, fictive diary entries track one woman's 1960s and '70s in this engaging, well-constructed first novel. Molly Williams is 40 and near suicide when she begins rereading the journals she started in 1969; the story they tell comprises most of the novel. Young Molly, a sheltered Connecticut WASP, sees her New York boyfriend kissing a man, flees him and finds herself at Woodstock, where she drops acid, flips out and gets help from a sensitive Chinese-American man called Johnson, who becomes her long-term companion. Back in New York City, Molly immerses herself in late-hippie culture, works at a New Age bookstore, embraces the goal of "unconditional love." She follows Johnson and his young son to a farm in Pennsylvania owned by Johnson's neurotic wife, Mathilda. By 1979, Johnson has become an altruistic lawyer, working against pollution and for Native Americans; Molly considers his politics self-serving, and his desire for another child a ruse to defeat Mathilda. The disillusioned Molly becomes involved with Nancy, a celebrated photographer. Later journals cover downtown New York's sex-and-art scenes, and the frightening advent of AIDS. Curran, an actress and playwright (The Lunch Girls; Alternations) has made her first novel partly a tour of its decades' zeitgeists, and mostly a story of slow growing-up. It asks, and shows, how a young woman of Molly's obvious intelligence could be exposed to so much '60s altruism and yet lack a sense of who she is. Curran's prose maneuvers ably between the requirements of narrative drive and the improvised feel of real journals; interpolated present-tense scenes give Molly's story a satisfying conclusion. Readers may want to shake Molly at times, but they'll enjoy sharing most of her trip.