Hitching to Nirvana — Janet Mason

Hitching To Nirvana is a tale of midlife and adolescence. Adrianne, a 45 year old photographer, has been running from her past all of her adult life. When time calls on her to care for her elderly father and she returns to the working class tract house neighborhood where she grew up, the news that her old high school best friend has died resurrects the ghosts from her adolescence in the 70s. The girls are modern Maenads - shining, wild, and doomed, trying to escape their soul deadening lives with alcohol, sex, and drugs. When Adrianne hits turbulence in midlife - her long-term relationship hanging by a thread, a new love interest beckoning, her job soon to be nonexistent - she finds that she must return to the past before she can go on. From the introduction, by Jim Cory: This is not a tale of triumph or redemption so much as a long look back, recast now in terms that re-create that past as Greek Mythic storytelling, here deployed to make the point that this grit-splattered picture of adolescent and present-day Levittown is historical pattern rather than anomaly. Her women could be goddesses, but in this anti-culture they're both unappreciated and expendable. Trying (and failing) to be a straight high school slut with a boyfriend, when what she really wants is to be a goddess with goddess girlfriends, leads Adrianne to conclude, among other things, that her sex works against her, a loaded deck if there ever was one.