The Girl I Left Behind

I just finished reading The Girl I Left Behind, by Judith Nies (which I spelled incorrectly the last time I wrote it), subtitled "A Narrative History of the Sixties". It wasn't my sixties although we are of an age, but it was hers, and also was much of the country's. Political goings-on that I had never known of. She researched and wrote about how Washington works, and coincidentally, the CIA, FBI, the women's movement. She talks at one point about finding her voice as a writer, having written professionally for others' voices - speechwriting, memoranda in the halls of Congress. She certainly has found her voice (this is not her first book, and I understand that she is about to publish another).


In a chapter titled "The Failure Theory of Success", she quotes Joseph Campbell, "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." That struck home for me of course; the life I had planned came, as she goes on to say, "to a dead stop," but I haven't let go of it yet. I need to get rid of it, or I won't have the life that is waiting for me. Later in the book, in a chapter titled, "Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli," her opening paragraph is:


"Job. Marriage. Home. These are the three pillars of adult life, the rituals and institutions upon which we hang out our identities. Their loss strips away the person we think we are and leaves us way back inside ourselves, looking out at life as if through a porthole. We see a landscape we don't recognize."


I'll have to reread the chapter to see what its title means!


I read the book personally, trying to find myself in it, and maybe I did find a whisper.


Great book, subject, and style and voice.