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

Published 1973, Doubleday

"We were dragged through the mud of Relevance and Grim Reality and now we have a certain tough, I've-been-there attitude. We're tired, often more from boredom than exertion, old without being wise, worldly not from seeing the world but from watching it on television."

30th Anniversary Edition!

Buy now from iUniverse.com!

To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book, Looking Back, I'm bringing out a new, print-on-demand paperback edition (with a reproduction of the original cover, from 1973, and a new foreward by me). I'll also be posting a readers' guide to the book, here on this website, for the use of teachers who might want to incorporate the book in classes. (I guess this book has been out long enough now, my observations fall into the category of History.)

An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life - a portion of the article that led to the publication of my first book, Looking Back, the following year.

In addition:

In conjunction with the release of Joyce's latest novel, The Usual Rules, and the release of the 30th anniversary edition of Looking Back, a new edition of To Die For is now available through iUniverse.com, with a beautiful new jacket featuring a painting by Dori and Joe DeCamillis, of Birmingham, Alabama.

From the cover of Looking Back:

Let me tell you why I wrote this book. I am eighteen years old, which makes me a member, by age if nothing else, of what nonmembers call The Younger Generation. Now, maybe we aren't worth all the time and thought that's devoted to us, but the fact is that, deserving or not, we get it. We're told that we are apathetic, disillusioned, irresponsible, impractical. I think it's time we spoke for ourselves.

So here is what one young person thinks about Young People and about using drugs and sleeping with boyfriends and dropping out to buy land in Vermont and live off the soil, about not caring any more what happens on election day but caring passionately about music and Jesus. Also about hitchhiking, and health food, and denim over-alls with holes in the seat.

And because you can't really know where we are and how we got here without knowing where we've been, this is also a book about high school soccer games and drinking parties and taking College Boards and going on dates and not going on dates.

Some of the memories are personal. I don't presume to be a spokesman for all my generation. But because we are media children, because the Beatles and the Kennedys were close as relatives, some of the memories are national, even universal. If there's a main theme, a single result of our sixties experience, I think it's the idea of growing up old, feeling not disillusionment so much as weariness. If chronicling my youth at eighteen seems strange, it is the prematurely aging sixties that make me look back, already, at what most people turn to only in old age.

Read the real story behind the writing of Looking Back in Joyce's memoir, At Home in the World. Order the hardback book, or the abridged audio version from the Joyce Maynard Catalogue.

Look for the originally-published versions of Looking Back at these booksellers/auction sites:

Amazon • eBay • ABE Books

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