I might never have heard of this book, but ran across some interesting posts on Facebook by the author, so I looked her up. And I'm so glad I did, because A POCKET HISTORY OF SEX IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A MEMOIR, by Jane Vandenburgh, is one of the most entertaining, funny, moving and Interesting memoirs I've read in a coon's age. A native Californian hailing from Redondo Beach, Vandenburgh has an unusually quirky sense of humor, and a strong, if shifting, sense of herself, as a girl and a young woman growing up in the 50s and 60s. She was a middle child (two brothers) from a very dysfunctional family, and, largely raising herself, she learned early on about such things as homosexuals (they weren't called 'gays' yet), the porn industry, suicide, mental illness and more. All stuff a girl shouldn't have to know about so young.

Vandenburgh writes in an elliptical, dizzying sort of style, not just jumping back and forth in time, but also sometimes in a circular, swooping, conversational way, going off on odd tangents, then coming back around to where she started. Which is NOT a bad thing; it suits her story, which is in many ways a crazy kind of tale, sometimes hilarious, other times heartbreakingly sad. She describes, for examples, visits to a friend's house where the father there sets up seedy porn films in a dark inner room of the house, then leaves the teenage girls to watch them. Jane and her friends became something of experts on the fine points of such films, soon able to predict just when "the money shot" was coming. Yeah, I know. Pretty creepy. But Vandenburgh manages to make it both funny, awful, and somehow moving all at the same time.

Unofficially adopted by an aunt and uncle when her own family has come apart, Vandenburgh tells of how she coped, how she and her brothers were blended in with their four cousins as they tried to learn how to be at least semi-normal. And later we watch her various attempts at college, work, and a first marriage to a much older man, a college professor. Two children later, she meets someone else. Divorce, remarriage, a move to the east coast, then back again. And through it all she struggles to adjust her own 'free spirit' to the demands of a normal life, never quite succeeding. Her new husband's career as a publisher takes them to Washington, D.C., of which place she tells us, with her California girl sensibility -

"... is one of the least libidinous places I've ever been ... The sexlessness of Washington, D.C., feels positively eerie, as if it thinks in its own mind it's the late 1950s, as if anybody cares whom you go to bed with! No one cares! No one cares whom you do or do not sleep with unless IT'S CHILDREN or maybe CHIMPS IN THE NATIONAL ZOO!"

Hmm ... I know this book was published in 2009, but are we talking about the same Washington, D.C., here? Well, no matter.

And she made me chuckle too in telling how she ended up in graduate school -

"... the consummate English major, of course, even though this is already an almost perfectly useless degree and I hate poetry that rhymes and the kind of poets - I think of them as 'fagotty' - named Byron and Keats and Shelley."

(I'm chuckling again, sorry, but I have similar memories of grad school, and Vandenburgh and I are about the same age.) But it's not all hilarity here, oh no. Her scary tales of casual sex in the 70s and 80s, which sometimes ended badly, VERY badly, are not very funny at all. And what she shares about her gay father, and how his family deals with his 'problem,' fluctuates wildly between funny and tragic. The same can be said of her mother's mental illness and outspokenness. But the chapter I found most moving of all was "Take Me with You," about Jane's longtime friendship with Carole Koda, Zen poet Gary Snyder's wife. Carole for years suffered from a rare form of cancer (that took her life in 2006), and the obvious bond that showed between the two women as they spent a long afternoon together nearly brought me to tears.

But enough. Quirky, crazy, moving, sad. All of the above. I loved this book. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )