A Pocket History Of Sex In The Twentieth Century: A Memoir

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Description

Jane Vandenburgh's life began normally enough. Born into "a certain kind of family"--affluent, white, Protestant--she came of age during a time when the sexual revolution was sweeping our cultural landscape. Her father, an architect with a prominent Los Angeles firm, was arrested several times for being in gay bars during the 1950s. He was sent to a clinic to be "cured" of his homosexuality; he committed suicide when she was nine. Her mother was a Bohemian who believed that she was glamorous and talented and could write her own rules for the way she lived her life. Convinced that she was being persecuted for being "unconventional," she lost her mind and was sent to a mental hospital. Vandenburgh and her brothers were raised by relatives in an affluent suburb in the San Fernando Valley, a place where drugs, sex, and generalized acting out were the waves of social change that were just hitting the beaches where they spent every weekend. Quirky and brilliant, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century is a fascinating blend of memoir and cultural revelation.

Reviews

"Intense, controlled, a memoir-as-fever-dream." --The New York Times "It's a rare pleasure to be in the hands of a memoirist both old enough and good enough to wring this kind of coherence from life's chaos." --The New York Times Book Review "Like a string of Chinese firecrackers." --Washington Post "This woman traffics in the truth." --Anne Lamott "A wholly original, beautiful book." --Michael Downing, author of Life with Sudden Death "The vividness of those people and the hard-to-describe implicit sanity and moral clarity that underly the always-about-to-get-out-of-control voice gets to feel funny, sane, heartbreaking, and so deeply intelligent ... It is just brilliant, and true." --Robert Hass, author of Now & Then

Author Bio

Jane Vandenburgh is the award-winning author of two novels, Failure to Zigzag and The Physics of Sunset, as well as Architecture of the Novel, A Writer's Handbook and The Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century, A Memoir. She has taught writing and literature at U. C. Davis, the George Washington University, and, most recently, at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, Callfornia. A native of Berkeley, she has returned to live with her family in the West, and with Wayne Thiebaud, her dog.