Free Love, Free Fall: Scenes from the West Coast Sixties

I may be biased! My son and I lived with Merimee and her son in 1976-77 in Arroyo Seco, NM. We had met a couple years earlier, part of a group of Taos hippie families, many headed by single moms, who were holding onto our values and alternative lifestyles against all odds. Her tales of trying to take life into her own hands, knowing there was something rotten in the state of the US patriarchy, trying again and again to find her own agency and inner truth, had me laughing and crying and so often saying, YES! you got it just right, you’re a true and honest voice for those revolutionary, rollicking, free, insane, dark and beautiful psychedelic years. I could review the book in a more conventional way, but others have done that perfectly (see Amazon). I think they got it. I want to say Just read it now. Many of us have said to each other, the true stories of those years HAVE to be told. The fiction, the retro-fashion statements, the movies, the socio-political studies, the more male-dominated tales have not come close to capturing the juicy and heart-rending stories like Merimee has.