cover image Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties

Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties

Jeff Durstewitz, Ruth Williams. Bantam Books, $23.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-553-10649-7

A rueful, sometimes funny look back at the dreams and excesses of the '60s counterculture, this dual memoir records a friendship that began in 1969, when Durstewitz, a hip high school senior from Long Island, N.Y., met Ruth Tuttle, a conservative Southern girl from Yazoo City, Miss. On a lark, he and his school chums wrote her a mock-indignant letter trashing the Deep South and the school paper she edited. When she unexpectedly replied, Jeff and two pals drove to Yazoo to meet her, sparking a Yankee/Dixie friendship that helped steer both of them through later affairs, marriages, crises and breakups. Rebelling against her parents, Ruth rushed into an unhappy first marriage with an LSD-popping, socialist anthropology major, which led to her nine-month stint as an organizer for the extremist National Caucus of Labor Committees. Jeff, an anti-Vietnam War activist, played in a rock band and smoked pot in the college president's office during a sit-in. Both later became entrepreneurs: she started an advertising agency, while Jeff spent several years running a Ben & Jerry franchise after rooming with the ice cream company's founders. Told in alternating voices and supplemented with correspondence, this memoir aims to relate an emblematic '60s coming of age story, but after the rush of the authors' first meeting, the story grows plodding, lacking the irony or hindsight that could have made it memorable. Still, many readers will identify with the descriptions of the era and the emotional roller-coaster that marked the authors' transition to adulthood, with all its compromises. (June)