"If memory stores the spirit of our experience, then a diary, in its bona fide physical existence, surely retains the flesh and blood." (p.9)
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In a memoir that will have a great many heads nodding in recognition, writer and photojournalist Margaret Sartor looks back on her youth in small town Louisiana during the 1970's. By all accounts, Sartor's was a very typical adolescence characterized by school, peers, dating, church and outdoor activities. The adventuresome middle child of a physician father and a homemaking mother, she and her family ("dysfunctional in the normal way") got along amicably in their comfortable estate house, a remnant of plantation days, embedded on the Ouachita River. It was here under cover of the moss-hung live oak trees scattered along the riverbank where much of the business of growing up took place--beer, cigarettes & making out as much a part of life as church youth group and prayer meetings.
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The very capable resource of Sartor's own teenage diary comprises most of the book's content; the original text, formatted into mostly one or two-line entries, employed as the primary means by which the author tells her story. Undoubtedly, her depiction of life between the years 1972-1978 (her own ages 12-18) gives a very open, unadulterated viewpoint of class, gender, race, love and relationships as well as the more at-large issues of the day like the tail-end of Vietnam, Watergate, desegregation and price goudging. It's the personal revelations which will interest readers though, Sartor's captivating, intimate and above all honest disclosures on the one period in everyone's life which remains unavoidably memorable and inescapably well-preserved.
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