Just Keep Shooting: My Youth in Manhattan
Memoir of a Midwestern Girl in the 1950s and 1960s
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
This memoir is a sequel to A Penny A Kiss: Memoir of a Minnesota Girl in the forties and Fifties. Just Keep Shooting finds the young girl entering her twenties. Anxious to shake off the past, she strikes out on her own to forge a career in the exciting business mecca that was New York City in the nineteen fifties. Eager, determined, fresh diploma in hand, she arrives to establish a life as an independent woman in a conformist era when young women were expected to marry and reproduce. Caught in the spirit of revolt and change that ignites the sixties, she throws aside convention as she sets out to discover like-minded free spirits and create a life that will satisfy her wanderlust and shape her identity. Her dreams light up the sky, but is she able to follow them through to the Promised Land?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her second memoir (after A Penny a Kiss), McConnell embarks on an immersive journey through nearly six years of post-college life during the late 1950s and early '60s, though it's difficult to discern any real impact that time has on the author's life. She traveled from home in Minnesota to Manhattan, Paris, and Spain, then to California and back to New York. McConnell recalls people she met and experiences including jobs at the U.N., in publishing, and at Forbes magazine. These gigs don't hold much for McConnell, nor do her loves and friends, who come and go. Her passions feel more like hobbies, as her film and writing aspirations are never fully realized. Throughout the book, McConnell makes clear her disdain for her mother, including her attitude toward the volatile politics of the day and married life. This gives the reader a loose sense of McConnell's ideals and beliefs, only to have it dismantled as she concludes the book with a rushed description of falling in love and getting married. McConnell works to define herself and her place in life, but by the end, readers are left with no better an understanding of her than when the book began. (BookLife)
