A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir for $9.20

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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.

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

Jane Vandenburgh's life began normally enough. Born into "a certain kind of family"—affluent, white, Protestant—she came of age during a time when the sexual revolution was sweeping our cultural landscape. Her father, an architect with a prominent Los Angeles firm, was arrested several times for being in gay bars during the 1950s. He was sent to a clinic to be "cured" of his homosexuality; he committed suicide when she was nine. Her mother was a Bohemian who believed that she was glamorous and talented and could write her own rules for the way she lived her life. Convinced that she was being persecuted for being "unconventional," she lost her mind and was sent to a mental hospital. Vandenburgh and her brothers were raised by relatives in an affluent suburb in the San Fernando Valley, a place where drugs, sex, and generalized acting out were the waves of social change that were just hitting the beaches where they spent every weekend. Quirky and brilliant, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century is a fascinating blend of memoir and cultural revelation.

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