Status: Completed (188 pages)

Recommend: Yes

Review: A supposed diary of a teenage girl in the 1960s who gets introduced to LSD and uppers and whose life very quickly spirals tragically downhill during the free love era. I was enchanted - I never even stopped to jot down the good quotes even though there were many. I was planning to re-read the book since I enjoyed it so much, but I did a wiki search and discovered that the purported diarist was likely not real and that the whole premise ("A Real Diary") is likely a sham. As I mentioned in a previous review, I can't stand being taken like that. It's likely I won't read the book again, but I'm glad I read it once. Especially at this point in my life.

It's striking to me how the diarist, prior to her experiences with drugs, considers herself different from her family and her peers. Especially her family. There was one entry where she talks about her brother, and how he just seems to do everything right. How he manages both his mother and father so well, and actually understands their points of view. How he doesn't seem to want to reach, or need for more. And the diarist is not like this. She is capable of these behaviors, understands them from her own experience, but can't seem to hold on to them. She is moved frequently by her dad's actions, writes of how much he loves her...yet can simply forget this at the most important times.

I get all this. I understand the outcomes of the diarist's life as a solution to these problems. Although the entire diary is perhaps fiction, the real author understood this solution too. The initial amazements of the solution followed by the late stage escape impossibilities. How quickly this shift can occur. How the solution can be chosen without even realizing that it's being chosen and why. The feeling of control when it's most elusive and temporary. The undying love of family who waits while the adventures need to be taken to their end.

And the most important entries: those where the diarist remarks "if only I had someone to tell this to" or "I know I should tell Mom about this, I really want to." The razor's edge of getting help - wanting it, knowing it's right there, knowing exactly what you have to do to get it, knowing it takes only a SINGLE WORD for everything to get right again - A SINGLE WORD - and being completely unable to say a single word. The entire body poised to speak, yet some lingering notion of worry, fear, doubt...the "oh it can wait" force. Masterfully captured in this book. The power of the ego, of pride. And not the narcissistic side of ego and pride that is typically thrown at those like the diarist. The fearful side of ego and pride, often not even yet labeled as ego and pride at all. Fear telling the ego "you've always been wrong, that's how you're in this mess in the first place, so don't trust yourself now to say one word." The gnawing pebble of fear that things will be worse if the word is uttered, abutted against the boulder of knowledge and wisdom that the word is salvation. Yet the pebble is mightier than the boulder so often. A pebble with a sufficiently long lever can overcome any boulder. Fear can always be long enough.

If only I'd said one word. Sarah...