Heretic's Heart: A Journey through Spirit and Revolution

by Margot Adler

The renowned NPR correspondent offers a fresh perspective of the sixties, in a candid memoir of civil-rights work, the Free Speech Movement, and her correspondence with a young American soldier in Vietnam.

Genres: Biography, Memoir, History, Religion, Nonfiction, New Age, Autobiography

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Margot Adler was an American author, journalist, lecturer, Wiccan priestess and radio journalist and New York correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR).

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1946, Adler grew up mostly in New York City. Her grandfather, Alfred Adler, was a noted Austrian Jewish psychotherapist, collaborator with Sigmund Freud and the founder of the school of individual psychology.

Adler received a bachelor of arts in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York in 1970. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1982. Adler died in 2014.

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir of the 1960s was written by Margot Adler, a leading figure in the feminist spirituality and witchcraft movement. 

Adler was born in 1946 into a sophisticated left-wing family. Her father was Kurt Adler, the son of the famous Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, and Freyda Adler, a beautiful, energetic New York school teacher. Both parents were fellow travelers of the Communist party, so Margot was brought up surrounded by wealthy, well-connected lefties, who taught her that a good life was one that combined personal and communal interests and that the point of it was to experience one's self with joy.

Margot's parents did not manage to live up to what they taught their daughter. They stopped loving each other and divorced when she was eleven. Kurt became distanced. Freyda succumbed to dangerous depression. Margot coped with the family problems by eating herself into an 180-pound body. Following her parents' advice about joy became difficult. From that moment on, Margot's life became a ceaseless effort to balance the family values with the urges of her neurotic unhappiness. Although she remained the ardently leftist daughter of her ardently leftist parents, inside she turned into a bundle of insecurities.

According to Margot, her experience in the 1960s were nearly identical to her parents's experiences in the thirties and forties. As soon as she arrived in Berkeley in 1964, she joined the Free Speech Movement, signed on for voter registration and took a soldier fighting in Vietnam for a pen pal. She was on the scene of the major events of the New Left sixties as they unfolded. Interestingly, the counterculture did not leave an impression on her. Margot remained, as she put it, sex-free, drug-free, rock-and-roll-free. She emphasizes this commendable fact throughout her narrative, and this repeated statement allowed me to pinpoint precisely what I sensed was missing from her narrative – dimension. Margot's voice sounds like that of a tourist of the revolution, not of a young person who was in the whirl of it. What comes of Adler's writing is an emotional numbness that seems to have permeated everything she engaged in and presents to us a protagonist that is, in a bizarre way, both present and absent.

The descriptions of politics are so devoid of details any journalist could have written them. For instance, Margot and her friend June obtained visas to visit Cuba as part of a student brigade. Freyda Adler had even joined an organization that supported the Cuban revolution. However, it appears as if Margot had lived through neither the Cuban Missile Crisis nor the attempts to assassinate Castro, nor her mother's revolutionary activity, for she depicts all of these in paragraphs that could have been written for a commemorative article. However, her trip to Cuba did allow her to gain some personal insight and might have been one of the reasons for her decision not to become a revolutionary.

The letters she exchanged with the American soldier in Vietnam are presented by Margot like their value is evident, but all I saw in them is the thoughts of two young people who did not fully understand what was happening to them and between them. Their letters did not speak for themselves. It was not enough for her to quote them. The exchange remains all surface and no depth and does not contribute any understanding to the events that it evokes.

The only person that comes to life in Margot's work is her mother. Beautiful and overwhelming Freyda Adler was a lively figure, whose influence on her daughter was enormous. Margot's ability to write without inhibitions and with love about a woman whose overbearing personality constantly threatened to absorb her daughter's gives the parts of the narrative dedicated to Freyda the dimension it lacks elsewhere. I could see Freyda because Margot saw her more than she saw herself. Freda's ability to draw people to her cause left her daughter deeply envious. She could not help comparing her experiences in Berkeley with her mother's life in New York, and she felt that her life would never have as much excitement as Freyda's. This is Margot's paradox: she was jealous of her mother's vitality, but at the same time she preferred to be a spectator, reluctant to dive into her own life.

For instance, Margot recounts radical feminist Bettina Aptheker's address at the reunion of the Free Speech Movement, which she was present on. Aptheker apologized for having being sexist twenty years earlier. Margot narrates that the women in the audience had tears streaming down their faces. This is all she has to say. Feminism as a movement for equality seems to have impressed her no more than counterculture had. I wish it had because it would have probably given Margot a perspective from which to see her experiences in the momentous 1960s with new eyes. 

HERETIC'S HEART is an incomplete memoir. Adler fails to do what memoirists have to do – see the bigger picture and make sense of what otherwise is just a series of disconnected events. This book delivered less than I expected.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read Margot Adler's most famous book, Drawing Down the Moon, in the 1980s, and heard her often on NPR, I was curious to know more of her story. While this book, about her life as a young radical in the 60s and early 70s, is very interesting, it's only half of the story and I wonder if she planned a second volume but didn't live to finish it.
I completely sympathize with her inability to really commit to any one ideology! I couldn't commit to paganism either, even at a time when it was sweeping the feminist communities, which she managed to do. There isn't much here about her approach to and embrace of pagan spirituality, which I would have liked to read.
The letters she exchanged in the late 60s with a GI in Vietnam, which it seems were the original scope of her intended book, are moving to read - she was immersed in the antiwar culture of Berkeley at the time, and while he was by no means a fan of the war, he was in it and called her on many things that denied or disregarded his experience. His remark that if you asked any soldier what he "was doing" there, his response would be just trying to keep himself alive, makes it clear that as usual the rank and file were not part of the ideological games of the political leadership.
The story isn't told in strict chronology but more in thematic chapters, which leads to some of those "but back in 1967" moments that can be annoying. More politically oriented readers might find her introspection annoying. However, her ability to look at everything from a little of the perspective of an outsider brings balance to stories that have often been unbalanced.
I wish she had lived to write more.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This autobiography recreates the 1960’s easily and clearly for those who either weren’t alive during the time or didn’t participate in the various counter-culture movements. It is a very appropriate book to read right now as it provides much-needed perspectives on how and why movements occurred during the 1960s. It cleared up some of my questions and helped me to see beyond some of the media-reported excesses to the heart and intentions of people, both then and now.

The book is created from letters and journals kept by Margot Adler and her family, which she says:

“. . . do confirm what I best remember. For all the limitations of my generation – our unconscious actions, our unexamined ideas, our often silly phrases – we were alive to the deepest spiritual values. We believed that exploration was lifelong, that one’s life work had to be honorable, creative and transformative. We seldom thought about consumption, or the eventual need to live the good life . . . We believed that nothing was fixed either in human nature or in society, and so we experimented endlessly.
“We had a multitude of failures and successes. To echo the words of Ms. Frizzle, the science teacher in the wonderful series of children’s books and TV shows: ‘We took chances. We got messy. We looked for connections.’”

While she initially talks about her family and childhood experiences, the focus of the book is her activism during the 1960’s civil rights movements. She begins with the Free Speech Movement at Berkley. It surprised me to read how conservative the faculty at Berkley was when she arrived in 1964. She and other students fought the system at the time in order to have free speech on a college campus. I was stunned. I thought college campuses had always had free speech, so this was a complete surprise to me that students had initially organized, protested, and used passive resistance techniques simply to be able to speak the truth in their on-campus newspapers and other venues.

She also relates how winning that right fueled a tremendous amount of optimism that direct action could change the world. It kept them energized to participate in the other struggles for civil rights over the next several years.

Adler helped me realize the tremendous heroism of black people (and some white people) who fight oppression and she writes about her realization of privilege – she can return to her (safe) white world at any time, take breaks, not think about race, and experience security at any time she needs to. She traveled to Mississippi in order to register black voters and realized:

“[T]these people are heroes. They have no security to begin with, and once they step out into the struggle, what little security they have is gone. I really don’t know where I would stand if I was a Negro sharecropper and stood to lose my life, or my job if I just signed a piece of paper asking for better drainage, a bit of pavement and some street lights.”

And yet there is a lot of hope to:

“There is singing outside the freedom house. Those freedom songs have something almost mystical about them. They make you light up with happiness no matter what you are feeling.”

She writes extensively about feminism, and shares examples from the 1970s that show, even though we’ve made some very visible gains, there are many ways in which women’s space is not our own. One passage in particular struck me:

“Everyone sat in a circle and spoke in turn, perhaps for ten minutes. There were to be no interruptions. This simple idea was revolutionary because in the seventies, whether sitting in a restaurant or reading a newspaper on a park bench, women were seldom left alone. They were almost always interrupted, even accosted by strangers.”

Yup, still true today.

One of the most absorbing sections of the book is her lengthy correspondence with a soldier in Vietnam. I could quote so much of that as he is very thoughtful and reflective, but I recommend people read her book and find out what he was thinking. What is so compelling is to have such close correspondence between a protestor and a soldier fighting in the war that is being protested. My guess is that did not happen a lot, or if it started (say, between family members) it probably ended in anger or frustration. They both seem equally intrigued by what the other is experiencing, which is really fascinating. They do meet eventually, but I won’t give away what happens.

As we all know, she becomes a journalist, and I think these skills are what enable her to write so well in this book about her ambivalence and contradictory points of view in relation to social theories. She agrees with parts of ideas, disagrees with other parts, and changes her mind as she gains different pieces of information, meets people with new perspectives, and participates in life.

Ultimately, her journey is a spiritual journey, and she acknowledges the value of that deep spiritual connection:

“The world of the Old Left had great truths, but its principal failing was that it could not bridge these divisions. It was too afraid of the irrational and its pull, and it did not really understand the human need for the juice and mystery of ecstatic experience; it did not realize that one can enter the flow of the mysterious, the non-ordinary reality known to all artists, poets, and indigenous peoples without losing one’s intellectual integrity; that one can dance round a bonfire until dawn and still make one’s living as a scientist or a computer programmer; that one can work to end poverty and exploitation but still embrace song and dance and dream. Like shamans of old, we can attempt to maintain our balance as we walk in different worlds.

"In my own life, I still begin each project with the question, What can I do to turn the world upside down, to question assumptions, to undermine received wisdom?”

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the 60's, but it is just as much a book for today. Margot Adler and I were born the same year and "came of age" in the 1960s, but our experiences were totally different. Raised by political activists, educated in a progressive private school, living in New York City, she ended up at Berkeley just as the so-called "counter-culture" was forming. Her participation was probably more thought-out than it was for many of the people there, and she kept diaries and wrote lots of letters, so she was able to recall many of the feelings and attitudes of that time about sexuality, war, and politics when it came time to write this book. Her correspondence with a soldier in Viet Nam was the catalyst for the book, and their conversations are food for thought even in the 21st century.

[Candice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an important and revealing description of the 50s and 60s

[Wordwizard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good. Focus jumps around a bit, but I found bits extremely compelling and can identify with a lot of it, particularly the tension between wanting to join some revolutionary/artistic/political group and devote one's life to that goal and wanting to be outside the circle of utterly dedicated people, watching, critiquing, "reading Theatre of the Absurd in a Paris cafe" as well as serious political works. She references the story of a young couple that she learned about in one of her politics classes. The woman wanted to devote her life to becoming "a revolutionary instrument," which meant she would have to forswear everything else, even the young man she was engaged to. Margot understood that urge, even if she couldn't fit her life into that mold, and I understand too. There is something so alluring about the idea of dedicating one's life to a Cause, of some kind of pure, almost monastic dedication to . . . whatever it is that appeals to one. I have a friend for whom this seems to have become the ideal. His Cause isn't political, though--it's academic achievement and a sort of code of honor. Again, I totally understand. But for me, this wouldn't work. Having one's highest aspiration be satisfaction with one's work might be noble, in a way, but that path of life runs parallel to joy. I need messy, imperfect relationships with messy, imperfect humans, not data sets. Achievement is great, but conversations are what make me feel alive.

I also could empathize with her explorations into Paganism, which were only briefly mentioned (in the last chapter of the book). She makes a WONDERFUL point about how intellectual left thought tends to neglect "the mysteries," how sometimes a spiritual connection can augment, not detract from, an intellectual one. I'm going to have to read her book on neo-Paganism now.

I do feel an affiliation with what she calls "the earth traditions," but I wonder if I could join a group to explore them the way she has. I don't think so; I tend to feel like I'm doing something self-consciously constructed when I go to a UU service, which is pretty intellectual. I did things when I was a kid, "ancient traditions" I made up myself, and I think I might need to keep on doing that for the most part. Sometimes spiritual exercises with other people work, but more often, for me, I keep feeling that it's constructed and that gets in the way of it becoming something *not* constructed, something more organic--if that makes sense.

[Darleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find Margot Adler's memoir to be important especially for understanding the complexity of the 1960s student movements from a woman's perspective. For me the most compelling chapter of this engaging memoir is her chapter on the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley at Cal in 1964. Adler's poignant homage to Bettina Aptheker is especially important so that we don't continue to think of the movement from the male perspective of rebellion, sex, and power. Instead, the women's role and their stories "emphasized the dailyness of struggle, connection, and the long slow process of meaningful change" (p. 103). In her 1984 speech reflecting back on the Free Speech Movement, Aptheker spoke openly about the oppression of women in the FSM and apologized for her own role in that.

We've known for a long time that women were treated in sexist ways in the student movements of the 1960s, and Adler's memoir is an important addition to the correction of how we understand the movement. It was not all about brazen rebellion. It was about living into one's ethical beliefs.

Two critiques: I think the memoir gets too bogged down by the correspondence between Adler and a Marc, a soldier in Vietnam, but the letters do give great insight into the lived experiences of two young adults during the '60s. And, I would have liked more treatment of Adler's journey into pagan spirituality which is tagged on almost as an afterthought in the final chapter, but presumably this is a part of her adult life that would didn't fit in well to his memoir.

All in all, I appreciated this memoir. If I taught U.S. History, I would assign this book since it offers glimpses into what it was like to grow up and live through the middle decades of the 20th century in the U.S.

[Malinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Margot Adler tells about growing up in the revolutionary 1960s and her role in that movement. She attends Berkley and travels through the South to register African Americans to vote. A lot of the book is about her internal struggle to find peace with her body image and how she meshes with the feminist movement. Also, she begins a correspondence with a soldier fighting in Vietnam. Some of the story lines in this biography appealed to me much more than others, but overall it was an interesting reflection.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this book. not your typical 60's memoir. the book relies heavily on the authors own correspondence from the era, both with her mother and with a soldier in Vietnam, as well as her own journals. it makes the book into such an immediate experience. her letters from the Berkley sit-in and subsequent arrest are incredible, i cried through the whole chapter. this is an incredible story of a journey to self, of coming of age at such a pivotal time in US history, of finding a purpose and a path. the book is only 300 pages, i could have read about 900 more. check this out, it's so worth it.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting first person account of demonstrations of the sixties in Berkley, civil rights workers in the south, an ongoing correspondence with an American Soldier in Vietnam and even the Venceremos Brigade, a group of American radicals going to work in Cuban sugar cane fields. Margot Adler was involved in all of this and brought the reader right into the thick of it. I'm a half a generation behind being able to comprehend these events as they happened, but learned more of the unfolding of the very turbulent 60's. I wish there was a 3 1/2 star rating.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this the same time as The Last Unicorn. I devoured the book. Read very quickly. Non-fiction. A woman's coming of age story. I appreciated Adler's take on the 60's. She wrote this book to describe her experience of political activism in the 60's, to try and counter the popular stereotype of the era as purely drugs, free love and music.

[Cicely · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting story of her life as a child, to a journalist with Pacifica Radio, and National Public Radio, to writer in the pagan community

[Michael Keating · Rating 2 out of 5]

Autobiographical

[Alexandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to love this but I couldn't get thru it.....I might give her other book (more on the Priestess/Wicca culture) a try at some point...