A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir

by Jane Vandenburgh

Book Overview

A true story of 1950s California, teenage rebellion, and a family torn apart by illicit desire: "Intense, controlled, a memoir-as-fever-dream" (The New York Times).

Born into "a certain kind of family"--affluent, white, Protestant--Jane Vandenburgh came of age when the sexual revolution was sweeping the cultural landscape, making its mark in a way that would change our manners and mores forever. What began as an all-American life went spectacularly awry.

Her father, an architect with a prominent Los Angeles firm, was repeatedly arrested in police raids on gay bars. Ultimately placed in a psychiatric hospital to be "cured" of his homosexuality, he committed suicide when she was nine. Her mother--an artist and freethinker--lost custody of her children when she was committed to a mental hospital. The author and her two brothers were then raised by an aunt and uncle who had seven children and problems of their own.

In the midst of private trauma and loss, Vandenburgh delights in revealing larger truths about American culture and her life within it. Quirky, witty, and uncannily wise, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century is a brilliant blend of memoir and cultural commentary full of hard-won insights that explode across the page "like a string of Chinese firecrackers" (Washington Post).

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158243459X
• ISBN13: 9781582434599
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Superb Shared History

This memoir picks up where Jane Vandenburgh's novel Failure to Zigzag left off, an unforgettable trip that begins with a noir childhood in Southern California of the '50s. The author's father, a respectable architect with homosexual desires, can't construct a future for himself within the lie he's living, commits suicide, leaving behind a bohemian leaning wife and three young children. Her widowed mother goes mad and loses custody of her children to prosperous relatives living in the San Fernando Valley, where the author finds an alternate reality to the Sunset Magazine myths of the time. The religiously pious, philandering adults maintain an alcohol induced calm around the backyard pool while the drug addled kids surf their way through a sexual revolution. Local color includes a neighbor cop who plays porn films for his teen daughter's girlfriends. Vandenburgh brings a clear eye and a sharp wit to both the hard and hilariously oddball times she's experienced. As an adult who has survived a bad marriage, raised good children and found real love, she brings a Buddhist's graceful acceptance to the telling of this deeply felt and exquisitely observed life, a life her ill-fated parents tragically could never have imagined.

Wild Sass

I am loving this book, and couldn't wait to put in my two cents even though I have a few more pages to go. Vandenburgh's humor is right up my alley, and I like the way the first and second sections of the book complement each other, for doesn't one's history always affect the present tense? Her wild and crazy past gives resonance to her current life in Berkeley. She "gets" each character with a snatched-up line set into italics that makes each family member real, achingly felt, just like it is when you laugh too hard. Laugh until you cry. Go for it!!!

Jane Vandenburgh is brilliant

I just saw this book reviewed in tomorrow's New York Times, and I can't wait to read it--everything she has every written is first-rate--Failure to Zig-Zag is a great novel, as is The Physics of Sunset. She's unbelievably smart, heartbreaking, honest, hilarious, poetic, and real. This woman traffics in the truth.

Pocket History is Funny, Outstanding

Outstanding. When many memoirs are nothing but exegeses on disease episodes, or attempts to lend "fine writing" to life history, this gets it in a way that's sensible and novel. Few can write as transparently as Vandenburgh does here-- the words never get in the way, and it's damn funny. Integration of the peculiar social history of the 50s-60s is artfully done-- and there are new insights aplenty. Sex is handled refreshingly, neither fetishized nor dismissed, in a way that seems to almost transcend the usual requirements for gendered writers to make their case "in one way or another." The first part of the book is one of the stronger accounts of adolescence I have ever read. A masterpiece.