It’s 1972, and the Sixties are gone, baby gone. Only Michael Stein, Age 19, doesn’t have a clue. Soon enough he will. The love is gone and all that’s left are the drugs. How the dream died and what there is left after. How you cope. A Northern California beach-side town, and Michael Stein, a serious Bob Dylan fan, is bummed out as he walks across the quad at The University. He is searching, searching for what he calls the authentic real. A way he felt, a way he lived, in the late Sixties, in the days when he was with her, his high school girlfriend, his first love. Searching for who he was before he lost Sweet Sarah, and his life crashed and burned. But on this day Michael Stein is different. He’s not who he used to be. He’s Writerman. As Writerman, he’s aware of so much. As Michael Stein, he doesn’t have a clue. Michael Stein. Writerman. The young man. The Myth. Michael Stein is obsessed with sex. Writerman too; only for Writerman the sex is more than sex. Sex is the door to intimacy, and transcendence. And women, especially one woman, his Visions of Johanna, is the only door he knows to escape into ecstasy, and free himself from himself. For Michael Stein, the Sixties ended in the nut house. His parents blamed his erratic behavior on drugs. Michael Stein blames himself. After all, he broke his Sweet Sarah’s heart. Aware. Both Michael Stein and Writerman are aware they are living through one of the biggest social changes America has experienced. Trouble is, Michael Stein isn’t aware that the Sixties are over. Writerman, though, always The Warrior, always The Seeker, Writerman has a clue: The love is gone and all that’s left is the drugs. Michael Stein, on that sunny day on the quad, well something extraordinary happens. He meets a fellow traveler, Lord Jim, an uninhibited freakster bro who’s going to turn Michael Stein on to more than the drugs. Michael Stein doesn’t know it yet but he is about to set forth on the wildest ride of his life. True Love Scars is book one of the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy. These three books are one long deep breath. The exhale is obsessive, transgressive. How macho meets feminism. How second chakra rises up to third. Through all the women: Sweet Sarah, Beat-Chick Elise, Jaded, Simone, Harper, Eve. A puff, a party, a tragedy -from marijuana to angel dust, teenage heartbreak to addiction, from All You Need is Love to the junked-out punk of the New York Dolls. True Love Scars. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll like you’ve never experienced them. If you liked Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, this book, which some might call Literary Fiction and others might call New Adult, is for you. Michael Goldberg is comparable to Kerouac in a 21st century way… MARK MORDUE, author of Dastgah: Diary of a Head Trip
True Love Scars reads like a fever dream from the dying days of the Summer of Love. Writerman pitches headlong into a haze of drugs, sex and confusion in search of what no high can bring: his own redemption. Read it and be transformed. ALINA SIMONE, author of Note to Self and You Must Go and Win
So who is this protagonist anyway? Holden Caulfield meets Lord Buckley? PAUL KRASSNER, founder of The Realist, author of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture
Radioactive as Godzilla. RICHARD MELTZER, author of The Aesthetics of Rock
It’s a terrific read. TOM SPANBAUER, author of I Loved You More
Michael Goldberg paints crazy intimate portraits of the excesses and eccentricities of the sexual revolution. He speaks to us in the voice and language of the brave microculture of his youth. To hear a voice from this realm is a blessing. JOLIE HOLLAND, musician, whose albums include Catalpa and Wine Dark Sea His prose is hallucinogenic in all the best ways. DAVID BROWNE, Rolling Stone Contributing Editor, author of