The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
In Augusta, Gone, her first memoir, Martha Tod Dudman writes about a tumultuous time with honesty – expressing fear and anger as distinctly as she expresses her understanding of her daughter Augusta’s attraction to a dangerous lifestyle. Dudman admits to having found the same choices – sex and drugs – irresistible during her college years at Antioch in the 70s. How then can she deny her daughter the same experience? When does it go too far? If you’ve seen the recent independent film Thirteen, this memoir will hit similar notes.
Dudman’s stream-of-consciousness style allows the reader to experience the extreme conflict of the moment while maintaining an awareness of the much calmer past Dudman is trying to regain. As she struggles to remember that the venomous daughter before her still carries that younger girl inside, we experience the same range of emotions that Dudman does. Most powerful of all, the reader questions how a mother can hate her daughter as passionately as she loves her.
Although Dudman’s experience is very specific, Augusta, Gone contains mother/daughter struggles that will seem familiar to many. The extreme love and hate expressed between these two women is universal. Dudman writes: “You want to push away your daughter when it gets like that. Because there’s too much self-reproach in seeing her stoned, lying, dirty, lost. The kind of girl you never meant to have.” This same struggle is evident in Augusta’s behavior, wanting her mother while also shoving her away.
Much later in the book Dudman writes: “I sort of get it now. She’s who she is. I can tell her what I think, what worries me and what delights me, but I can’t make her be a certain way.” This realization is backed by a book that admits to an often-ugly heart but successfully depicts a mother as a multi-faceted woman capable of great triumph.
Dudman came of age near the end of the sixties, at a girls’ prep school in Virginia and then at Antioch. Expecting to Fly, her second memoir, recaptures her own first times – dancing in a psychedelic dress; kissing on the couch (“a vast corridor full of teeth and smooth walls and strange, slippery, soft damp places like a cellar full of bodies or an underwater tomb”); smoking marijuana, dropping acid; cutting away from parents. She describes the confusion of adolescence: “I didn’t know what I was like … if I was sophisticated or shy; if I was daring and sexy or lumpy and dull.”
Here is Antioch in 1969: “It’s like this magic place outside of time, outside of all the rest of the world … which is full of the tired old men who run the government, make wars in Vietnam, turn everything into advertising, make cruel stupid jokes, don’t understand. We’re beyond that, in this separate, stoned cool place and for the first time in my life I feel as if I belong.”
The story does not depend on its era. Dudman’s young self, the girl who keeps expecting to fly, is a hungry soul lunging for excitement and falling into puzzled distress. “I was weighted down with how it was inside me. It wasn’t one thing. Not boys. Not school. Not even my mother, though I wanted it to be her. … whatever it was had to do with the way sometimes I got so scared. … And what could make that feeling go away?”
This is an interesting book for readers who grew up in Dudman’s era, especially those in Yellow Springs. But it’s more valuable for hungry souls coming of age now. The world is no less exciting, confusing, and dangerous. Young readers will not find answers (“There are no answers here,” Dudman warned a recent audience at Books & Co.). But they will find a kindred spirit to help them think about the questions. 