Every time she’s caught for missing a comma or some other infraction, she gives him a “sensuous look,” which she knows can only go on until he loses control. She tries to be as precise and descriptive as a camera would be.ĭoris is a secretary in an attorney’s office when the book opens. “Not a diary, that’s ridiculous for a trendy girl like me.” No, Doris’ life can only be fully captured in a movie, and so Doris tries to see her world as if through the lens of a camera. You’d think there’s hardly anything left to say about the poor novel, except that it is a truly charming window into a young woman’s life in the early 1930s.ĭoris, the main character, decides to write a book about herself. In the 1950s, it was resurrected as a feminist manifesto the diary of a working girl in Depression-era Berlin.ĭamned by the Nazis, hailed by the feminists. “The Artificial Silk Girl,” written in 1932 by Irmgard Keun, then 23, was blacklisted a year later by the Nazis for its anti-German portrayals of businessmen and bureaucrats. Translated from the German by Kathie von Ankum Why? Why me? Some tales are told for the teller, more than for the audience, and “Pagan Time” is one of them. She begins the book on an almost whiny note: I need you to see this, I need you to understand, she repeats again and again. There is a little too much mythologizing about that time in her life, especially about her father but more off-putting to the reader is Perks’ neediness. To her parents’ credit, whatever their philosophy or religion, their ideas are immediately transformed into action: erecting a tepee village, setting sail on Lake Champlain for days of fishing and drinking (including the disturbed adolescents), killing and eating only wild food: grouse, bear, venison sex in the open, and with whomever you like, open meetings, open rooms, open psyches. The stories Perks remembers, from age 5 to the present, defy what we call parenthood, society and sometimes even gravity. Thankfully, there’s almost no philosophizing in the book, about going back to the land or about wilderness or our own wild natures.

Perks’ parents ran a school for disturbed adolescents but spent most of their time, according to the author, acting like disturbed adolescents. Remember? Well, that’s kind of what Micah Perks’ memoir of growing up in a hippie commune in Vermont is like.

Pagan Time by Micah Perks