Maureen Stanton won the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction for Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, a portrait of a master antique dealer and the flea market scene. In Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, Stanton's subject is herself, the scene her hometown of Walpole, Mass., and its omnipresent maximum-security prison.
"Dusted" is how Stanton spent several formative teen years in the mid-1970s. For her, angel dust--phencyclidine, more commonly known as PCP--and other drugs offered respite from the pains of her large family's broken home and her damaged sense of self. Teenage Stanton dreams of liberation, of "flying monkeys and smoking caterpillars and Big Sur and Haight-Ashbury and communes and love and everything from the sixties that we didn't know was already gone." Glamorous Walpole is not; Stanton's first job is at a gas station. (Trying for a job at the pharmacy, she is rebuffed: "We only hire pretty girls.")
Stanton often positions herself at arm's length, still reconciling the confluence of drugs, geography, love and dumb luck that shaped the life she longed to escape, one that somehow rarely saw consequences. "Wish I didn't have to come home at all" she writes in her diary in 1975. With hindsight, she adds: "There was nothing oppressive about my home life; the opposite--nobody was paying much attention." Perhaps aptly, Body Leaping Backward is not always tidy in its fractured blend of memories and research. But it is memorable and beautiful--people will certainly pay attention now. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer