Having read “All the Way to Second Street”, it was fun to juxtapose that account with this interview of author Nancy Casey. Naturally she doesn’t tell the whole story to the interviewer. Clever authors need to tease their public. Ms. Casey’s overarching theme from her travails in the “back-to-the-land” movement of the 1980s and its hippie westward-ho caravans was that she matured from a (very well-educated) “little girl to a grown woman”.
But “now for the rest of the story”: She walked out on her first husband, a gentlemanly attorney from the mid-West, much to the disdain of her family of traditional Catholics. Soon she was precociously hooking up with a narcissistic “redneck socialist” for whom she bore two children, raising them off the grid of mainstream society. But the rebellious hippie wannabe soon found that her “Garden of Eden” was full of thorns and human predators, the chief of whom was her mate. It was a perilous way to “grow up”, and one senses she still bears the psychological scars of being both morally negligent and the victim of a drug-addled alcoholic. Nancy Casey is so well spoken and comes across as such a stark and often amusing writer that it’s difficult not to fall into a love/hate relationship with her. The “little girl” who assumed she had all the answers plunged into a quicksand of torment. We pray she emerged from it a whole woman.