Pagan time

Micah Perks opens her memoir by admitting how hard she has found it to explain her childhood to anyone, herself included. She was raised at a commune her family built in the Adirondack wilderness, and she writes about that upbringing as a way of bridging the distance between her past and her readers.

The book centers on her father, a British bohemian who called himself a pagan and set out to tear down conventional rules and morals. In 1963 he and Perks' mother, a idealistic young woman from Brooklyn, left with an old jeep and a newborn daughter, hoping to start a school and a utopian community in the mountains. The school soon gained a reputation as a refuge for teenagers struggling with drug addiction and serious emotional troubles, and Micah and her younger sister grew up alongside them. Her father was an artist who loved surprises, tricks and adventure. He once split the commune in two to stage a mock war, and on another occasion he sent everyone out onto the ocean in leaking lifeboats.

The memoir holds two perspectives at once: an affectionate account of the utopian longing for community and freedom, and a sharp look at what that longing cost, especially the children. It asks how a vision of perfection could endanger the welfare of a child. Set against the sixties, a period that for many became both a laboratory of hope and a source of chaos, the book examines how young idealists pushed at the boundaries of freedom and what that meant for the families they built.