Chasing Shadows
Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
CHASING SHADOWS tells the story of a young man who pays a heavy price for pursuing his own dream. When he announces that he intends to be a poet instead of a doctor, his working class family thinks he’s gone crazy. They send him to psychiatrists who shoot electricity though his brain, warn him that he’ll never hold a job, and confide that he will suffer from nervous breakdowns all his life. After a stint in a state mental hospital, he spends the ‘60's on the mean streets of New York City, not as a fair-weather hippie with a room of his own in Scarsdale whenever he tires of the hard life, but as a fugitive from everyone, and everything, he once loved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a college student in the 1960s, Wilcox determined to experience everything--"become a cricket or an oak tree," "argue with the moon," live "life's mystery." To his working-class parents in Iowa, however, his desire to be a poet meant he must be crazy, and they sent him to psychiatric hospitals for observation, pills and shock treatments. Eventually he left Iowa and began chasing shadows, first in San Francisco and then in Manhattan, where he lived a hand-to-mouth existence on the Lower East Side with hippies, junkies, winos and various wayward girlfriends. Wilcox (Uncommon Martyrs: How the Berrigans & Friends Are Turning Swords into Plowshares) impressionistically describes his frenetic life on the streets of New York City, the characters he met there and his unsuccessful attempts to hold down odd jobs. Interspersed are harrowing accounts of his experiences in mental institutions and scathing outbursts of resentment toward his mother. In the last chapter, he comes to terms with, and almost forgives, his parents, but the end is a letdown; the heart of this funny, sensitive and disquieting book is in Wilcox's depiction of the angry, manic world of the '60s.
