Playing catch with my mother

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Skillful writing rescues this memoir from being just another chronicle of adolescent angst, and a genuine attempt to grapple with what it meant to come of age during the feminist movement of the late 1960s and '70s grounds it in the life of the nation, not just that of the memoirist. Lichtenberg successfully evokes the time when he was growing up in Manhattan with two parents whose marriage was impacted by the women's movement. After a trial separation, his mother and father experimented with a new lifestyle in which both worked and shared the housework. However, Lichtenberg recalls that their fighting continued to escalate until they eventually divorced. As a teenager, he was disturbed both by his father's brutal outbursts and by his mother's feminist consciousness, which, he recalls, sometimes caused him to feel guilty about being male: "My father had a problem. His problem was being a boy." Lichtenberg's sexual awakening further confused him, and he perceptively describes how his personal turmoil caused him to deliberately sabotage a relationship with a girl who cared about him. The book ends on a note of earned optimism, with Lichtenberg and his fiancee enjoying the fruits of the often tumultuous revolution in gender roles endured by their parents' generation, "imagining choices beyond the cruelties of tradition and the shortsightedness of rebellion." (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

A premature, somewhat shallow memoir of a bright young man's coming of age, from infancy through high school, during the 1970s and '80s. Except for a vague reference to "our dreams of [gender] equality set to rock and roll," Lichtenberg, a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers Workshop who has taught writing on the university level, never makes clear what the old rules of becoming a man were or why and how they have "all changed." In the first third or so of the book, he does have some moving passages concerning his father's fits of rage, his mother's creative and feminist leanings, his parents' briefly dropping out of careers to pursue a dream of the simple life in rural California, and their divorce. Yet far too much of this work is devoted to Lichtenberg's often successful, if unnoteworthy, quest for status and sexual experience at the elite New York City high school he attends. If the author is ideologically for gender equality, in his behavior, he is pretty much a traditional, prefeminist American male. And in this largely self-absorbed book—perhaps not coincidentally, the longest chapter is entitled "My Don Juan Complex"—the author manifests little critical self-reflection, while family members and friends usually are portrayed without real depth or nuance. In addition, there is a depressing dearth here of allusions to the wider worlds of culture and ideas, of politics, society, and religion. Lichtenberg's book thus serves as a caution to potential memoirists to ask themselves two questions: Has my life and times really been significant enough to try and capture in book form? And, if so, have I thought about it probingly enough, and can I faithfully andimaginatively capture its texture? In this case the answers to both questions unfortunately is "no."