Speaking for a Generation: A New Book Captures the Personal Side of Our Shared Past

My first published essay appeared on the final Sunday of 1969. One night, I quickly jotted down my thoughts about that tumultuous decade. My father knew someone at the Los Angeles Times, and the next thing I knew, I was the Op-Ed’s featured piece. Called “A Child of the Sixties: From Mouseketeers to McCarthy,” it garnered a lot of attention and made me a symbolic star of the young set—well, until Joyce Maynard came along with her cover story in the New York Times Magazine.

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When I read that piece today, it feels terribly sad and oddly prescient. "I have been playfully loved by a black boy. Ten years later, I am hated by the same man: not because I am me but because if am white.” Like so many others, I was inspired by Joan Didion’s sparse, powerful—and personal—words. Could I do that too? Could I do that again?