Grown-Up Fast: A True Story of Teenage Life in Suburban America

``We had, by late 1973, been stoned nearly every day for a year.'' So Israel sums up her listless passage through a confused adolescence. In harrowing detail, she recreates the drug-saturated ambience of the Long Island schools where she sought acceptance among peers alienated in their own ways, and joined sexual games with intensity. When pregnancy had to be dealt with at the start of her college career, she was forced to relinquish her child. Now a magazine editor in Manhattan, Israel writes affectingly of the trauma through which she emerged. This account of an adolescence of little contentment is impressive with its clear message about the family life that suburbia is allegedly designed to enhance. (August)