Reviewed by Ed Lengel

One of the so-called “stories” of the 2020s has been about the burgeoning resentment between Baby-Boomers and Millennials. In fact, each generation defines itself in a way that usually goes against something from the preceding era and its worldview. Coming of age in the 1980s, as I did, entailed seemingly endless, nostalgic exposure to the 1960s by those who had lived through that tumultuous decade. Two of my high school friends were Vietnam veterans. Many more were former student protesters, sometimes out and out hippies. And by the 1980s they were not ready to forget. Like my peers, I was raised on movies like Easy Rider, 2001: A Space Odyssey (with its psychedelic end sequence), The Graduate, and even Midnight Cowboy; in school I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was taught to admire Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, George McGovern and—to despise—Richard Nixon. No one had to ask twice what Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s Ohio was about—or any other of their other music. Like many of my peers, I came to resent this endless, self-indulgent nostalgia. Singing along with Billy Idol, we said, “Trying to forget your generation … Your generation don’t mean a thing to me.”

As in most things, however, perspective brings understanding. Baby Boomers had been through a lot. By the late 1970s, the same men and women who had protested the Vietnam War, fought for Civil Rights, experienced the psychedelic era, and grooved to liberating music and the Sexual Revolution, were beginning to settle down. Shockingly, they found themselves living out lessons taught by their parents: marrying, having kids (far earlier than today), getting jobs, and making money. They didn’t just abandon their ideals, but let them go slowly, sometimes in anguish. It was a time of soul-searching. Like Jackson Browne’s Pretender, they wondered “what became of the changes, we waited for love to bring,” and were “caught between the longing for love, and the struggle for the legal tender.”

Sara Davidson’s Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties, is a product of that era—of a generation growing older, taking stock, wondering where they were going, and pondering whether the years of their youth were so much wasted time. As the Prologue explains, Davidson was already well past the protest days, unhappily married and beginning a professional career, when in 1972 she ran into one of her college friends, Tasha, in a Manhattan hotel. Tasha was married, too, and entering the high society art world. Not having seen each other for years, they caught up on their own experiences, and reminisced about another friend, Susie, a former college radical. From this chance meeting, Davidson hatched the idea of writing a book that would chronicle their lives, and those of other friends, side by side, to rediscover their place in the world as the dreams of adolescence faded.

In their youth, Davidson remembered, everything seemed simple. “There were good people and bad people, and we could tell them apart by a look or by words spoken in code. We were certain we belonged to a generation that was special. We did not need or care about history because we had sprung from nowhere. We said what we thought and demanded what was right and there was no opposition.” What about now, ten years later? Remembering, and processing, was much more than just reminiscing. At times, said Davidson, “the burden of memory was so painful for me and the others that, alone in my house, I would writhe on the floor.”

Loose Change alternates narratives from Tasha and Susie; all of the names have been changed, except Davidson’s. Their stories are episodic, whisking by early childhood in the 1940s and 1950s to focus on the glory days from 1963-1969, when they enjoyed drugs and free love, spoke naively about peace and understanding, but also tumbled headlong into the uglier side of what they hoped would transition into revolution, akin to the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. And then there was the transition; In the chapter titled “The Day the Music Died, 1971-1973,” Davidson quotes a girl she knew who had become “fed up” with youth culture. “Who needs a messy revolution where everyone ends up killing everyone else?” she said. “I tried for two years to change things and saw it was impossible. I have other things to worry about, like getting into college.” And, from the perspective of 1977, it seemed like all downhill from there.

It would be facile to dismiss the three protagonists of Loose Change—all physically attractive, Southern California Alpha Girls from wealthy families—as elitists. The fact that all of them were Jewish also set apart their experiences from those of small-town or inner-city kids who experienced the sixties very differently. But the intensity of their experiences, and of their anguished adjustment to broken—or abandoned—dreams is unfeigned. While many of their experiences seem pedestrian in retrospect, or (thinking more compassionately) typical of youth of any age, there was something unique and vital about them. Boomers had a right to think of themselves as pioneers—and if they did not exactly fashion the world as they would have liked, they surely did change it.

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Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.