Y'know that wandering generation?..still wandering.

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essay collections

When we were young, many of my generation—the '60s kids, the ME generation, the Boomers—embarked on a journey, one by one, to "find myself." What did we find? Most of us found something, and settled down. Now, we're the Establishment, the un-trustable over-30s, mainly the grand, moderate majority that both political wings claim as their turf. The ones that didn't really find much make up those wings.

Marion Winik is a writer, essayist, commentator on NPR since 1991, and, one might say, a pretty successful person. Her most recent essay collection, Above Us Only Sky, reveals the journey, still in progress, of a lost soul finding itself.

The book is sectioned as History ("Back"), Family ("Underfoot"), Introspection ("In the Mirror"), a special, formative Historical Vignette ("Back Again", comprised of the title essay), and Surroundings/Relationships ("Around").

Ms Winik shows us herself, warts and all. She doesn't flinch from showing us her self-contradictions. Atheistic to the point of anti-theism (the book's title expresses it: there's nothing up there but sky), she revels in remnants of her Jewish upbringing and her first husband's love of Christmas. Clinging tightly to her youngest daughter, trying to raise her well, yet she made this baby with a definitely risky man. She writes with her head (a very good brain in there, and excellent writing indeed) about a lifetime of following her heart (a very fickle heart at that, much of the time...but when she loves, she loves hard, long, and well).

She can be lyrical, and she can be crude, almost vulgar (it takes more than a couple f-words to make be stop a book early...I came close); she covers quite a spectrum of experience and reverie. As I am a right-leaning moderate, I found it interesting to read and try to get into the head of someone who actively campaigned that Reagan be impeached, who lives in a world in which "my kind of thinking" is considered akin to the average Martian.

Marion Winik hasn't really found herself yet. Her continued journey makes interesting reading.