Notes From Nethers

September 10, 2007
There are iconic excesses—nude sweat-lodge ceremonies, interminable house meetings, ghastly raw-food diets, a public birthing followed by placenta-enriched soup—in the author's fraught memoir of her childhood on the titular rural Virginia commune and attached free school, founded by her mother, Carla. Psychologist Eugster was duly scarred by the countercultural chaos and flux of strangers into, and friends out of, the commune, which left her feeling “trapped in freedom,” lonely, alienated and withdrawn, “a child adrift in an adult's idealized venture.” Still, this isn't Augusten Burroughs territory. Nothing too outrageous happened to Eugster, and Carla, the book's charismatic, domineering center, also appears a responsible parent who fights epic battles to enforce a 9 p.m. bedtime. Indeed, many of the traumas that occasion Eugster's dudgeon—a snit with a schoolmate who rebuffs her, a pet accidentally run over by a communard's car—seem like ordinary growing pains. Young Sandra's sensitive, sometimes neurotic temperament often looms larger than the commune's transient, unstructured environment in explaining her intense feelings of anomie and abandonment. Eugster paints an engaging portrait of the odd Nethers lifestyle, but it's very much a child's view—an idiosyncratic perspective that alternates between scenes of idyllic beauty and small tragedies blown out of proportion.

October 15, 2007
On the same day in 1969 that Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Eugsters mother moved her three daughters from Baltimore to rural Virginia, where she set up a commune. We might as well have been on a spacecraftourselves, writes Eugster, who was nine at the time. In this probing, intimate memoir, Eugster recounts the challenges of growing up in an environment where the margin between freedom and endangerment is slim. The work is hard, the education unfocused, the awareness of adult sexuality comes too early, and reentry into the conventional world, as a college freshman, is bewildering: How do you talk to people? How do you shave your armpits and legs? . . . Where do you buy bras? But Eugster, now a psychologist, also writes with deep tenderness about her family, the skills and strength she gained from her exceptional youth, and the shifting relationship between parents and maturing children. Like Tim Guests My Life in Orange (2005), this is a fascinating, evenhanded view of counterculture life in the 1970s.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)