Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties

by Joyce Maynard

First published in 1973, when its author was nineteen years old, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties has become a classic to many of the baby boom generation, for its sharply observed account of coming of age during turbulent times. Now used in many high school English and social studies courses, this new edition is being brought out to mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of the original, not only for those of Maynard s generation, but to make available, to the current generation of young readers in particular, a work that may inspire them to give shape to their experiences of growing up, and as a reminder that a person is never too young to tell his or her own story.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Biography, American, 20th Century

163 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Joyce Maynard first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” in 1973, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose “Domestic Affairs” column appeared in more than fifty papers nationwide, a regular contributor to NPR. Her writing has also been published in national magazines, including O, The Oprah Magazine; Newsweek; The New York Times Magazine; Forbes; Salon; San Francisco Magazine, USA Weekly; and many more. She has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Charlie Rose, and on Fresh Air. Essays of hers appear in numerous collections. She has been a fellow at Yaddo, UCross, and The MacDowell Colony, where she wrote her most recently published novel, Labor Day.

The author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel To Die For (in which she also plays the role of Nicole Kidman’s attorney) and the bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, Maynard makes her home in Mill Valley, California. Her novel, The Usual Rules—a story about surviving loss—has been a favorite of book club audiences of all ages, and was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the ten best books for young readers for 2003.

Joyce Maynard also runs the Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in Guatemala, founded in 2002.

Reviews

[Terrie Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truthful. Bold. Articulate. Soulful...

Joyce Maynard's first book was published in 1973 when she was nineteen—a personal account of growing up in the turbulent 1960s in the United States. Reading and listening to her words and voice was like reliving my youth. I was born the same year as this author, so yeah, it felt familiar. This is my generation, too.

This book became a significant piece of cultural commentary for the Baby Boomer generation, capturing the intricacies of being a teenager during a time of massive social and political change:
The Vietnam War
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Civil Rights Movement
Women's Liberation
The Drug Culture

One of my favorite memories she shares is of The Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Die hard Fab Four fan here!

Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Old in the Sixties is a candid and fearless memoir by a brilliant and gifted author who was just beginning her writing career!

4⭐

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1971, then a young college student with no professional writing experience, Maynard asked the prestigious New York Times to let her write for them. Amazingly, they agreed. Her assignment was to reflect on her generation, to describe what it meant to come of age in the 1960s. Looking Back is the result; it launched her career. Maynard grew up in a quaint New England college town, small enough that she could ride her bike anywhere, insular enough that high school bake sales were a regular occurrence and the protests that rocked the nation were only as close as the TV screen. This is not a researched study, but a personal memoir. So it feels a bit ironic to have this author characterize her social group as world-weary, oppressed by the anxieties of too many pressures and too much stress, dependent on technology and rather jaded. I suspect most readers will see a simpler, more idealized time in these memories. Considering that she wrote this just a couple of years out of high school, I am surprised by the distance she creates from the events she narrates and impressed by the polish of her prose.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In which I discover that I like Joyce Maynard's nonfiction writing better than her fiction.

[Toni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could relate, but I couldn't relate.

[Diane D · Rating 5 out of 5]

When a fellow blogger told me about this memoir by a favorite author, I couldn't wait to read it, as I also grew up "old" in the sixties.

I expected the memoir to be somewhat shallow or maybe a bit frivolous given the fact that the author was a nineteen-year-old college student when she wrote this book. I was pleasantly surprised that this wasn't the case at all. Her writing reflects personal experiences and observations that were written with depth and vision. Maynard had me reflecting on my own life back then, a tumultuous time -- the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy's assassination, women's lib, the sexual revolutions, birth control pills became available, marijuana and other drugs were being tried by some. It was also the end of the senseless Vietnam War and the age of Woodstock.

Maynard also talks about the younger days growing up, when going back to school meant shopping for new lunch boxes, new barrettes, admiring pretty shoes but, having our mothers purchase the practical ones instead, after getting our feet measured in the metal foot measuring gadget at the store. When 4th grade meant boys still had "cooties" and dolls were still tempting to girls. We recall that someone in our class was designated the "genius" or another classmate the "class jester", and by 5th grade all that changed, when the school nurse showed the girls the "Now You're a Woman film", and we became obsessed with sex talk at recess and first bras.

The sixties were a generation where many of us didn't make plans, but rather, "let life happen", believing that everything would work out in the end. It was a generation where many children of non college-educated parents were raised to believe that going to college wasn't for them. Many got married, took blue-collar or secretarial jobs or became housewives.

We grew up with the "first" televisions, watching and dancing to American Bandstand on television on Saturdays, Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, The Flying Nun, Father Know's Best and Ozzie & Harriet. The Beatles exploded our music scene, cars were for parking as much as they were for driving, we went to drive-in movies, and pantyhose was a new invention. And, gasp --- we weren't a generation of readers either-- we had the first televisions remember and that was new and exciting. We bought books, but many stayed on the shelves unread (much like they do today).

The author does a beautiful job capturing the hopes and fears of my generation. I highly recommend this delightful book.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maynard's thought-provoking Labor Day made my top ten list for 2010. Wondering what else she'd written, I stumbled across Looking Back which was first published in 1973 when Maynard was 19 years old. The new foreward alone is worth the price of admission. Her insights help me make sense of my own past; our shared memories of Women's Liberation, high school fundraising, the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns, and the back to nature movement make me want to throw my arm around her shoulder and dissolve into giggles and tears.

[SEY · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book spoke to me quite deeply when I was a young woman. Read it after a semester away at college, home waiting for my summer job to start. My older brother had just missed going to Vietnam. Somebody else was seeing the same world as me, she was an articulate young woman working to figure it all out with education, experience and words. I was too. This was the right book at the right time for many of us in the early seventies!

[Robert Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce Maynard was born in 1953 eight years after me. Her experiences growing up Durham, New Hampshire included a culture shock as the sixties hit New Hampshire, she was ten when Kennedy was assassinated, while I was eighteen and graduated from high school that year. Joyce was fifteen when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, whereas I was twenty three. I had gone to the same public school Joyce went to through my junior year. We both witnessed a horrible sadistic cultural norm that involved putting others down, teasing, and counting points to gain social standing. Durham, as a University town was supposed to be more intellectual and progressive than the surrounding towns, however as far as having a positive culture of inclusiveness, Durham was not doing well. I found Joyce's descriptions of the community and her social perceptions very colorful with nuances and exceptions that showed her to be very perceptive about social situations and a creative colorful writer. I had moved to New Hampshire when about seven, going into the second grade, from Oklahoma, so I was faced with cultural ridicule and rejection sometimes very unexpected. In second grade on a very hot day in New Hampshire I did what students in Oklahoma had often done. I took off my shirt. Whoa, slow down there boy, that is unacceptable behavior. I was chastised by the teacher and had to put my shirt back on in short order. While Joyce was adjusting to the social changes of the hippie generation, and felt it as a culture shock, I had moved with my parents to California and was helping there to create the hippie energy that was shocking her. It appeared to me that she embraced much of what came from the hippies as a fad and did not really understand the message of individuality, creative self expression, and exploration of consciousness. She was exposed to psychedelic music in songs, psychedelic art on album covers, and in posters, and at a later time in ads, however to her it was not genuine. I found her writing to be very good and would recommend the book as a good read.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a “must read” for me, since I, too, was born in the fifties and grew up in the sixties. While the author makes some excellent points, I have to say she doesn’t speak for all of us.
For instance, her ideas about books, looks, and watching television differed greatly from mine. I could relate to her point of view, though, in spite of the fact that her favorite tv show was Dr. Kildare (yuck!) and she collected every issue of Seventeen Magazine.

Since she originally wrote the contents at age 18, I think she can be respected for her observations and writing skills at that time. I read an anniversary edition, published 30 years later, so I especially like the Introduction, written from an “older and wiser” perspective:

“I should perhaps temper my statements with apologies, for saying “we” all through this book, when there are so many people I’ve no right to speak for (where are the blacks? the teen-age dropouts? the people of my generation who read—really read—books? I cannot speak for them).”

And: “It would make me very happy to think that reading this book might inspire some young person to record and make sense of his or her own growing-up experiences—not the Kennedy and King assassinations any more, or Vietnam, but Columbine, and 9/11, and Iraq, the obsession with technology, the vast and seemingly irreversible destruction of air and soil, forest and ocean.”

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me weeks to read this slip of a book, but there are some pretty interesting elements to it. Not least: the introduction to the anniversary edition, in which Maynard (older, wiser) acknowledges that her nineteen-year-old writer-self was, well, a little self-important...and also hiding a lot. Honestly, I think it's a better book with the context of that introduction; Maynard is gentle with her younger self, but comes across as...I'm not sure how to put this. Much more aware of nuance, I guess.

Looking Back itself is done in a style that I'm not sure I've seen before. Not quite stream-of-consciousness, but more touching on ideas and themes from a decade or so rather than delving deeply into any of them. Anecdotes but no scenes; lots of generalising of experiences; a carefully world-weary tone. It seems fitting for what the book is, though that style probably contributed to how long it took me to read it (the other factor: I was only reading it when I couldn't sleep). It's hard to imagine something like this being published today—it's just a different shape of a book, really—but rather fascinating in, and for, its context.

[Claire Le Mycélium · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un livre assez intéressant, décousu, j'ai aimé le recul que prend l'auteure dans la préface

http://chroniquesdunchatdebibliothequ...

[Paul Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first glance, one might assume massive hubris for a 19-year-old girl to write a book called Looking Back, but this slim volume (subtitled, A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties) is not only strikingly mature, but even way, way, way ahead of its time!

Growing up in the 1960's, as many of us of a certain age know, was not easy for anyone, be it the children themselves, their parents, their grandparents, or even their younger siblings. It would be easy to assume that an author so young would end up chronicling facts, but facts are scarce in this memoir that concentrates its attention instead on psychological issues of teenagers in the 1960's. Maybe the insertion of the word "Old" into the subtitle should alert us that this book will be a little unexpected.

What does she mean "growing up old?"

Part of what she discusses are the issues that young people were assaulted with during this stormy time: the Vietnam War, assassinations, political change, drugs, hippies, medical advances, sexuality, women's liberation. Kids were forced to be mature before they were completely ready for it.

It is greatly to Joyce Maynard's credit that she so cogently breaks down such complicated issues simply by telling how they affected her and her friends. Her own maturity is astounding and her use of the English language laudable, especially for a self-confessed TV junkie. Until I read this book, I never realized how deeply the array of television shows in the 1960's affected people. The book is full of innocent profundities, moments that are really touching and meaningful.

It is a slim volume, but the content in immense. I highly recommend this book to all!

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is merit here. The memories relived are notable for a person of my generation, a decade younger than the author. SRA reading brought back some memories. There is worth here. And it is unfair that the authors later relationship with JD Salinger clouded her life for so long. And what the literary establishment did to her in 1998 begs for a rebuke from today’s generation of Me too.

So, worthwhile, but while realizing this is not the original essay that appeared but a revamping, a reworking, a book length version, I do in reading it wonder if it was as earth shaking as it was made out to be.

In the sixties, evidently, growing up Maynard watched a great deal of television. She comments on her older sister who still remembered “ getting “ television. Not so Maynard, born in 1953 there was no “ before television “ time for the author. Her description of the inane shows she watched and enjoyed, the television movie’s destruction of a desire to read, it all rings true.

When she speaks of previewing each weekly TV Guide as if she is picking out a weekly menu brings back significant memories. I recall the feeling of looking at each new guide we received each week, the previews of episodes, the upcoming “ specials.” The anticipation of this silly little magazine shows how middle class America was fully conquered by television.

[Carol Tensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties showed up on my daily Early Bird offerings and being a child of the sixties it piqued my interest. The first chapter stands out in its heartfelt prose. This short memoir, perched in between childhood and adulthood, opens with her taking a five-year-old to New York. In a few vignettes she establishes her place in the world as a teenager. In the following chapters she describes being a “tween” (the term, of course, came into being many years later); her dissatisfaction with her school (really? reading SRA booklets as instruction?); the comfortable “symmetry” of TV plots; sixties makeup (I had the paintbox eyeshadow that she described). Her recollections of growing up in the nuclear age were spot on. She did tend to go on rather long about virginity and comformity. And she made a point of setting herself outside of (above) the pack. Still, all in all, I found this an enjoyable read. Had the whole piece been as well written as the first chapter, I would have given in four or five stars.

The bulk of Looking Back was written at J.D. Salinger's property in rural New Hampshire. He had seen the article “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life” in the N.Y.T. Magazine and wrote to her. They began a correspondence that led her dropping out of Yale and coming to live with him. Their relationship ended abruptly when he summarly sent her packing. I couldn't help but think of how "Jerry" Salinger would feel if someone had treated Phoebe or Jane Gallagher, the way he had treated Maynard.

[Bob Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

What “They” Thought

I was born in late 1950, so in some fashion author Joyce Maynard and I share a time frame of growing up and maturing in the 1960s. And, parenthetically, I also spent my career as a writer - for smallish newspapers. I picked up this book because I figured we shared an upbringing.
But I found in the book something intriguing.
Awash in hormones at the time, my buddies and I always wondered, “what are the girls thinking about?” as they mystified us yet controlled our waking hours, and often our dreams.
Maynard’s youthful yet powerful writing assignment for the Times that became this book offers a lot of answers to those youthful questions we asked then, questions I still ponder at age 73, having been married to the same woman for more than 49 years.
Life and the opposite sex remain as mysterious as ever, but I’m grateful to Joyce Maynard for a peak into her thinking at the time.
This remains a lively and still relevant read.

[Roméo VM · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ce bouquin a été écrit en 1973 par une jeune femme de 18 ans, qui donne à voir et à entendre ses considérations sur la vie, sur sa génération. Le bouquin a mal vieilli car, à la vue de la grande autrice qu'est devenue Joyce Maynard et de son expérience, il y a un fossé, un gouffre entre l'adolescente qu'elle fût et la femme qu'elle est maintenant. Dans l'édition française de ce livre publiée en 2013, Joyce Maynard est d'ailleurs assez critique de son propre roman, des certitudes quelle assène du haut de son tout petit âge. Pourtant, tout le talent de Maynard palpite déjà dans ce petit texte qui reste un joli miroir de ce que fut la jeunesse des années 60.

[Sue Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm two years older than the author, but close enough in age that her stories of growing up in the sixties reminded me of similar experiences. The book started diverging from my own life experience as she got into 1969 (the year I graduated from high school and started university), but it was interesting to see how other young ones navigated those years. This book has piqued my interest so I now want to read At Home in the World.

[Marie S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should have DNFed it, but I like Joyce Maynard so I kept going. She warns us in the foreword that she might sound a but pretentious. More like totally pretentious. It was hard to read and I didn't get anything out of it. Everytime a topic I was interested in came up, she managed to be obnoxious about it.

[Jody Bender · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when it was first published and I was 15. Joyce Maynard seemed impossibly sophisticated and worldly to this small-town girl and I read her experiences with great anticipation. A few years later, I left my small town for the city and have eagerly explored life in cities, bustling suburbs, and villages. This remains my favorite book of hers, although I very much enjoy her fiction and am currently devouring The Bird Hotel.

[Kim Cloutman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was taken by the NYTs article and the fact that Joyce was only a month older than me. So her observations were very similar to mine Her relationship with Salinger was intriguing. Watching the documentary Salinger I was wondering if she d be included and naturally she was

[Kim Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second book I read for Nonfiction November is Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties by Joyce Maynard.
The was first published in 1973 when she was a mere 19 years old and a sophomore at Yale. I was captivated reading about her experiences growing up in the turbulent era when the world was dramatically changing.
I chose this book because I thought it was the memoir about her relationship with reclusive author J. D. Salinger. It turns out that she covers that connection in a different book, but it didn't matter because I loved this one!

[R. Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful, colorful and often poignant insights into a turbulent era that long has fascinated me. Remarkable achievement for a writer who was a first-year college student at the time.

[Marion Catherine Rey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mon écrivain préférée !!!

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in while in high school during the 1970’s and was shocked how it captured my childhood and my school days so accurately!

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes painful to re-visit our youth, but interesting all the same.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a woman about the same age as Maynard, it was a trip down memory lane in some respects and in others a reminder of what irked me about that time period.

[Laurel-Rain · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1972, an eighteen-year-old girl from New Hampshire wrote an essay for the New York Times, entitled “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life”. Within days of the article’s publication, many letters came pouring in – requests for other articles, offers to go on television, and offers to meet with editors. One offer culminated in this book – an expansion of the article she had written for the “Times”.

In this memoir, the young woman, Joyce Maynard, wrote about her experiences growing up in a time when the world was changing dramatically – a world shaped by political activism, war, drugs, and women’s liberation – and how such events, plus the constant media presence, dictated how a generation perceived the world.

Speaking as one person affected by these complex changes in our culture, Ms. Maynard describes coming of age in such a time as “growing old”. Perhaps a kind of cynicism, or world-weariness
from the constant barrage of images from television impacted her view of the world – and the view shared by many of her peers.

Nevertheless, she also illustrates her growing-up years with the “normal” kinds of experiences – the same insecurities and fears – that shadow most young people. She also points out in her foreword that she does not consider herself to have been “representative” of the typical experience of youth in her time. In fact, she states that the act of writing about these experiences in a way “sets a person apart from the territory of which she speaks.”

It is impossible for me to read this book, however, and not relate to it as someone having lived through similar experiences. Not the experience of living in New Hampshire or having written a book at a young age, but the commonality of fears and insecurities that hound most young people in any time, but especially in an age (such as the sixties) when change was dramatic and constant.

I had read this book many years ago, but in rereading it recently, I still could relate to it. Ms. Maynard’s fiction is compelling, as well, including the novel "To Die For"…But her memoirs (another is "At Home in the World"), are erudite studies of growing up female in the Baby Boom generation.

[bob walenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1973 this memoir is one of Joyce Maynard's first published books when she was a sophomore at Yale. It is a collection of writings about growing up in a small town on New Hampshire during the 60's and early 70's. What is clear from these entries is Maynard's skill at story telling, her natural ability to craft a tale and engage the reader. Her observations are cogent and clear. Her explanations and reasons are solid. I found myself nodding in agreement over and over as I read, sometimes laughing, occasionally still angered at a specific point that she made.

I am 7 years older that Joyce Maynard, and remember everything she wrote about as reflective of my own experiences and memories. What were different were only those things pertinent to our age and sex differences. Our values, understandings and sympathies were clearly aligned. That Maynard could realize so much of this, either at the time it was happening or only shortly thereafter is extraordinary. Her powers of observation and ability to see the "big picture" are admirable.

Much of what Maynard describes is universal, and children from most generations experience them as they come of age. But what she was particularly skilled at was pointing out those issues which were a direct product of those particular times. Just as the Depression and the World Wars defined their American cultural ethos, so did the post WW II and 1950's define the Baby Boomers. Her 'Looking Back' was sharply focused and observant and she did a remarkable job of understanding and explaining those events and issues.

This memoir paints a warm, funny and accurate portrait of the Baby Boomers and what they experienced. What is most remarkable about it is Maynard's ability to observe , organize and understand ALL of these events almost as they were happening to her, without the benefit of many years, which usually is the key to making a memoir resonant.

[jimtown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written at age nineteen in 1973, Joyce Maynard takes a look at growing up in the sixties. This is not your usual memoir but more a state of the union type address on the times. Joyce was pretty insightful for one so young. I only wish she would have written it in the first person rather than to try to encompass the whole generation. She even knew that herself, not to generalize, but she still did a lot of generalizing from her point of view.

I could relate to many of her thoughts, some things she explored a little more in depth than I would have and other things, I never even gave a thought to. At one point, I could picture her, like a million other kids glued to Saturday morning TV. She thinks our generation grew up a little jaded by the TV and media. It's true that we were the first to have TV but we have to remember what those early shows were like. They were still treating children like children. We were smart enough not to need the 'Don't do this at home kids' messages that the future brought.

Joyce has views on everything from cheerleaders to the moon walk. Her views are not mainstream, but were influenced by where she lived and how she grew up. She also had another huge influence while writing this short book. At age 18, she had written the New York Times offering to write an article on An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life. She was taken up on that offer and it catapulted Joyce to instant recognition and fame. One of the people that noticed her was the reclusive writer, J.D. Salinger. He was the other influence while she was writing Looking Back. I think her other works will be worth looking at to see how one of the youth of the sixties made her way through the world, then and today.

[Nath · Rating 3 out of 5]

J'ai voulu lire ce livre car le titre me plaisait bien et puis je suis une fana des USA donc ... :)
Il faut savoir que c'est un livre qui a été vendu aux USA dans les années 70 et qui n'avait jamais été traduit en Français jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Et cette année c'est la première fois qu'il est édité en France.
L'intro est intéressante, Joyce Maynard nous parle un peu du parcours de ce livre et de nous donne des précisions, j'ai beaucoup aimé ce passage. Je trouvais d'après cette intro que le livre allait être très prometteur.
Par contre la suite de ma lecture fut chaotique ... j'ai eu beaucoup de mal à rentrer dans ma lecture, je pense que je m'attendais a autre chose, je ne sais pas .. mais je n'ai pas été emballé.
Il y a toutefois des passages intéressants, mais j'ai eu l'impression que ça partait dans tous les sens.
Il y a beaucoup de personnages de cette époque , que je ne connais pas, qui sont cités et du coup j'ai vraiment eu du mal a me mettre dans la peau de cette ado. Peut-être aussi le fait du décalage avec les années une ado des années 70 est complètement différente d'une ado de nos jours ... et même pendant mon adolescence les choses étaient déjà différentes ...
Donc une petite déception, surtout que j'ai lu un de ses romans juste avant et que celui-ci m'avait beaucoup plu donc j'étais partie confiante en lisant ce livre.
Autrement l'écriture est assez fluide, les chapitres sont relativement court.
Je remercie les éditions Philippe Rey pour ce partenariat.