Books : Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s

Margaret Sartor, a fiercely determined girl from rural Louisiana, who is equal parts “Holden Caulfield and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (Atlanta Journal Constitution), presents a poignant portrait of American life during the 1970s. Crafted from diaries, notebooks, and letters, this deeply personal yet universally appealing story moves with ease between the seemingly trivial concerns of hairstyles and boys to the more profound questions of faith and identity. By turns funny and poignant, heartbreaking and profound, Miss American Pie tackles all of the decade’s issues—desegregation, drugs, the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, and the spread of charismatic evangelical Christianity—with humor, frankness, and unexpected insight.

Praise for Miss American Pie:
'This is a gorgeous book, and its power is not to be underestimated' - Alyce Miller, Chicago Tribune
 
'A winning narrative voice that is equal parts Holden Caulfield and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm....Sartor's adolescent journals document every nuance of the life around her with the razor-sharp acuity of someone twice her age.' - Andrea Hoag, Atlanta Journal-Constitution 
 
'[Sartor] trusts that readers will be captivated by the details of her ordinary, goofy, bucktoothed life, and we are.' - Claire Dederer, News & Observer
 
'The prose is laconic, guilelessly revealing and often unintentionally satiric…. Priceless…['Miss American Pie'] speaks for itself, in all its awkward, embarrassing and heartbreaking immediacy.' - William Grimes, New York Times
 
'I've just finished reading the most amazing book. 'Miss American Pie' isn't a portrait of adolescence, it is adolescence, with all the sorrows and yearnings and tenderness that attend that age. It's our youth served up to us once again on a golden plate.' - Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World
 
'a charmer.  It all feels refreshingly authentic—like reality TV without the posturing.' - O, The Oprah Magazine
 
'A picture of a time and place and a young woman that are as clear as and memorable as any reader’s own adolescence, with all its triumphs and heartbreaks....charming, enlightening, honest...' - New Orleans Times-Picayune
 
'By turns funny and poignant, heartbreaking and profound…absolutely delightful.  If you enjoy a laugh-out-loud walk down memory lane, this is one you should read.' - Carolina Herald
  
'poignant, funny, conflicted -- and suffused throughout by a bracing directness….one of the best accounts of female adolescence in many a year…' - Mobile Register
 
'This life reads like a forgotten classic. Every word is beautiful and true.' - Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish  'Authentic...immediate...Miss American Pie is a real knockout, throwing the reader right back into all the chaos, pain, and drama of adolescence. Getting Saved, finding out about sex, relating (or not) to family, making and breaking friendships-I was completely caught up. Miss American Pie has universal appeal.'-Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls 'One of the most captivating memoirs I have read in recent years. Sartor's diaries bring to mind both Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and Daniel Clowes's Ghost World. Her achievement is an evocation of a very specific place and time that never feels dated or suspended in amber. Her narrative of family love and estrangement, of sexual awakening with those early years' strange mix of desire and repulsion is one of the most human and humane explorations of a young girl that I've come across. Miss America Pie is a distinctly American story by a gifted writer.'-Virginia Holman, author of Rescuing Patty Hearst 'Margaret Sartor's enchanting Miss American Pie could not be more time and place specific but its appeal will be universal. A complete delight. '-Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage and The Ongoing Moment  'A splendid account of the early years of a woman whose mind and broad, deep sensibility would see her through a fairly normal-sounding adolescence in the Deep South of small-town Louisiana into an adulthood of genuine artistic distinction. The diary has a grave self-doubt, a brilliant eye for the perfect revealing detail, and the beginnings of a saving wit. Miss American Pie has brought me up short with its generous outpouring of all this fresh and moving reality.'-Reynolds Price, author of The Good Priest's Son

Margaret Sartor, a fiercely determined girl from rural Louisiana, who is equal parts “Holden Caulfield and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (Atlanta Journal Constitution), presents a poignant portrait of American life during the 1970s. Crafted from diaries, notebooks, and letters, this deeply personal yet universally appealing story moves with ease between the seemingly trivial concerns of hairstyles and boys to the more profound questions of faith and identity. By turns funny and poignant, heartbreaking and profound, Miss American Pie tackles all of the decade’s issues—desegregation, drugs, the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, and the spread of charismatic evangelical Christianity—with humor, frankness, and unexpected insight.

Margaret Sartor is a writer and photographer who has been widely published and exhibited. She teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

An Introduction
Monroe, Louisiana, isn’t a very small town, but  it’s small enough. In the 1970s, the divorce rate in my hometown was nearly nonexistent, church attendance was roughly 100 percent, and the rules of proper behavior were generally agreed upon, if often ignored. You could be a licensed driver at fifteen and order a double bourbon at eighteen, which meant that we were driving at fourteen and anyone who looked eighteen could buy liquor at 7-Eleven. We purchased cigarettes from vending machines, rode bikes without helmets, and thought seat belts and sunscreen were for wimps. Marijuana was available, but still uncommon. Sex was available, common, and never discussed openly between polite parents and their children. Monroe wasn’t a backwater, but it wasn’t progressive either. On the whole, I would say my hometown was entirely typical of its time and place, more confused than reactionary, a sort of stronghold of befuddlement.
I grew up on a boulevard lined with live oaks that were ancient and dramatically canopied over the beginning of the road, but dwindled to saplings no taller than my father toward the recently paved end where we lived. Our house was a ramblingly comfortable orangey-red brick ranch in a growing development of one-acre lots carved out of a pre-Civil War cotton plantation along the banks of the Ouachita River. In more ways than one, Monroe and the economy of northeastern Louisiana were built on the black soil of the merging floodplains of the Mississippi and Ouachita rivers, and my childhood home was less than a football field’s length from the lesser river’s edge. Barges and boats traveled the Ouachita River from Arkansas to the Gulf of Mexico, and water moccasins and alligator gar bred in the shadows of the cypress tree roots along its edge. The river’s age and length were unimaginable to me and its depth swelled and shrank according to factors outside my grasp. Inseparable from the Ouachita, then as now, was the levee that snaked beside it like a miniature Great Wall of China, a man-made construction defying scale and logic, stretching, as far as I could tell, forever in both directions. Growing up, I felt I owned them both, or more precisely, I felt that since no one else owned them, the levee and river were always there for me. This is what I think of when I picture my past: the walk out my back door across the brick patio, past the overgrown azaleas and the tall metal swing set, up to the top of the levee and then down into a narrow swath of woods that led to a rise on the riverbank. I liked to sit there and write and watch the last light of day glare and glisten like fool’s gold over the fast-moving muddy waters.
In my teenage years, my immediate family—my parents, me, two older sisters, and a younger brother—was stable but less than uniform, a complicated arrangement held together by habit and stubbornness as well as love. My father, a physician, was intelligent, capable, generous, and kind, but he was not a modern man; he did not discuss his feelings. The rare times Daddy demonstrated strong emotions of any variety are memorable. He never panicked, but under certain circumstances, he lost his temper. I could walk in the back door covered in mud and cradling a broken arm and my father would remain calm, but a boyfriend arriving on a motorcycle would bring his blood to a quick boil. Maybe there was a time in my father’s life when he lacked certainty, wasn’t comfortable with life-and-death decisions, but I can’t imagine it. He was the eldest of three sons, raised on a cotton farm during the Great Depression by a widowed mother who taught elementary school five days a week and Bible study on Sundays. Daddy and his brothers all attended college and medical school on loans and scholarships, then returned to serve the same population in the same hospital and local clinics. To distinguish them from one another, patients and nurses called them by their first names. My father was Dr. Tom.
As much as Daddy was an exemplar of solid citizenry, my mother, Bobbie Sue, was generally viewed as eccentric, a free spirit: someone who never wore anything with a floral motif and always did her own hair. She was also, in the opinion of everyone but herself, drop-dead gorgeous, always at her most beautiful when she made the least effort, which was most of the time. Though she stayed home, I have trouble thinking of my mother as a homemaker. Mama was a decade younger than Daddy, unabashedly volatile, and she could draw and paint with near photographic accuracy. Even then I sensed that being a housewife and mother were roles with inherent limitations that did not naturally suit her. It was her studio, a locked room near the back door of the house, that nurtured her best self. By the time I was a teenager, I finally caught on that at least half the time, Mama only pretended to leave the house so she could crawl back in her studio window to paint undisturbed. My mother was well known for her antics and tricky practicality. She was funny and frank and whistled with her fingers in her mouth, the kind of woman adolescent boys fantasized their girlfriends would grow up to be. For me as a teenage girl, this was both fabulous and often fabulously painful.
Having two older sisters who regularly registered double takes among males of any age was annoying as well. From a purely psychological perspective, it’s safe to assume that my being the third daughter, followed by an adorable and troublesome younger brother, added a certain level of frustration to my formative years, a well-founded fear of being overlooked; but then growing up is difficult under the best of circumstances, and these just happened to be mine.
When I began the diary in 1972, my socially gifted oldest sister, Mary, was away at college. The next in line, Stella, whose serious personality was weighted in direct opposition to Mary’s buoyancy, was a senior in high school. My distracting younger brother, Bill, was ten years old, and I was in the commonly acknowledged worst year of life, the seventh grade. My parents were attentive, loving, and strict. There were rules, expectations, and consequences. When I screwed up, I always started the confession process with my mother, which was risky and dependent on her mood, but better than conversations with Daddy, which were logical, and therefore hopeless. The end result, in either case, was usually the same: I was sent to my room. When being sent to my room was extended to include days rather than hours, it was called being grounded. About the time I started being grounded, I started writing things down; it gave me something to do. Writing to and for myself had an acceptably low risk factor for feeling misunderstood or ignored, and it was a form of conversation I came to value more and more.
My bedroom, aside from being a place of exile, was also a refuge. The shelves were a cherished disarray of books, vinyl records, magazines, notebooks, and souvenirs. I collected things: books, model horses, rocks, and photographs of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Marilyn Monroe. My walls were an evolving collage of drawings, lists, snapshots, and 4-H ribbons. The decorative centerpiece was a poster above my bed, an image I mulled over daily until it gradually etched itself into my subconscious appearing even in my dreams, my first template of romance and longing: an enlargement of a black-and-white photograph of a young couple standing in a field at sunset, accompanied by a quotation from Frederick S. Perls that read, “You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s so beautiful.” Popular music was inseparable from my emotional life and I played records relentlessly. The volume to which I could push my personal angst was, however, strictly limited by the black Rub-a-Dub laundry pen mark Mama drew on the volume dial of my stereo. I remember my mother claiming, loudly and usually while surveying my room from my doorway (in blatant violation of the “do not disturb or die” sign which no one seemed to take seriously and I was powerless to enforce), that my bedroom smelled, and I suppose it did, but it was not disagreeable to me. The faint odors of oiled leather tack, potpourri, paints, candy bars, skin lotion, dog hair, and dirty clothes were all of my own making, and I thought my room was an OK place to be.
On reflection, I think the sediment of memory must resemble that room, and in my initial reading of the diaries there were times that I became aware of those long undisturbed layers of sensory information, images I didn’t know I could conjure, feelings I didn’t know I still felt. Reading an entry, such as, “Went skiing on the bayou. Mitch kept flirting with me and I kept liking it.” and an entire afternoon’s experience would suddenly be revealed to me in full: the appalling heat, the relief of the breeze when the boat was in motion, Mitch’s extremely short cutoffs and the fact that he wore no underwear. Scratch the surface and the past was there. Heartaches mostly. And the buried hurts and humiliations that hurt and humiliated me all over again.
 
I have heard it said that there are two times in your life when you stand a chance, in the face of whatever social forces struggle to get you in their grip, of becoming someone new, of creating your own personal universe through the sheer power of imagination and persistence: one is adolescence and the other is middle age. Maybe this is hogwash. Maybe it’s profound truth. I certainly make no claim to know. What I do know is that very near my forty-third birthday, it dawned on me to look at the diaries I began when I was young. I didn’t know how young. I wasn’t sure at what age or even why I had started keeping diaries, because scribbling in blank books, tossing them into storage boxes, and hauling them from car trunk to closet, has been a natural part of what I do for so long that I had never, that I could remember, given thought to when it actually b...

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Customer Reviews for: Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s

Rating - Good coming-of-age for women
The things that mortify a teenage girl are so funny when you're thirty like me. This coming-of-age diary is revealing, humorous and relatable for all women. Some excerpts: "I don't know if my physical desires are normal or sinful, but they are certainly distracting."
"It bothers me that I'm jealous of Bonnie Dell and that she's beautiful and that I might hate her."
"I HATE leagues. I hate the parent's league, the junior league, the ... Read More

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Rating - Karrun
I'm only giving it a two because I actually finished it. This book is not literary genius. It is just a diary and that's all. The topic was exciting to me - reason I ordered the book - and I was so totally dissapointed by the writing style. A better idea for the author would have been to use the diary to create a novel. It was simplistic, but as I said I did finish it and know it could have been a better novel if written as such.

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Rating - Drove My Horse\Bicycle to the Levee
What did those song lyrics mean anyway? I didn't find the answer in this book.

Although Margaret went through her adolesence in the 70's and I experienced mine in the 50's, we had some common themes. Every teenage girl sometimes feels others have answers to which we ouselves don't have access.

It was interesting to read of Margaret's search for spirituality and her daily thoughts of how well she was living ... Read More

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Rating - It Surely Took Courage To Share This
First off, our decade's obsession with blogging has little in common with the art of keeping a diary, and anyone who doubts that might do well to read this book. A diary is normally a private thing, an exercise in personal meditation, a record of a life and those who pass through it, written by one's self, for one's self, and it's not often someone openly invites complete strangers to see something that is by nature so personal, and yet writer Margaret ... Read More