The Summer of Love Venice Beach

Sex, Drugs, & Transcendence is a highly unconventional family story that details my youth growing up in the epicenter of the “flower child” movement. Highly charismatic, magnetic, and a head-turningly gorgeous redhead who very much embraced free love, my mother, Annie, also struggled with significant mental illness, which made her as erratic and at times threatening as she was compelling. Determined to found a radical new society in the Fiji Islands (after India where we would become enlightened), my mother’s quest would end up causing us to intersect with many of the movers and shakers of the day, from The Beatles to Princess Grace, as she dragged my six siblings and me from Miami to California to New York and eventually over much of the European continent in search of “our people” and sponsorship for her dreams.

 

Along the way we would live at a commune  where we kids were all given hallucinogens daily as a path to enlightenment  we would experience the heyday of Venice Beach, where Mom met my stepfather, a young Brit who tried for many years to protect us from her volatility; we would spend much time at Apple Studios and visit the homes of George Harrison and John Lennon/Yoko Ono and eventually, living in Italy, my parents  would be arrested on the false charge of drug smuggling. A cause célèbre of the day, the rich and famous with whom my parents had hobnobbed became involved in trying to secure their release. Eventually, our family would land in Amsterdam, where, after years of desperately longing for a “normal family,” I found my own tribe at the infamous Melkweg club and parted ways with my mother, pursuing an unconventional life of my own.

​

These stories of my youth, which form the major arc of the memoir, are broken up by shorter interspersed chapters about my life in middle-age. The first of these chapters opens with a three generation LSD trip I look with my mother and grown daughter – one of my mother’s last wishes.  By that point I was living on a permaculture farming commune I helped found, focused on the local/sustainable food movement and practicing ethical nonmonogamy with my two long-term partners. Along the way, I had been a sex worker, a suburban wife and mother, business owner, a devout Catholic, and the founder of SexPositive Portland (which led to SexPositive World and 17 chapters around the globe). My adult life had been spent alternately rebelling against and embracing my mother’s immense influence in my life.

 

My memoir has elements in common with such works as The Glass Castle, White Oleander, Educated,, Wild Game, and a pinch of Shantaram. The book is not only a story of dysfunction and abuse but of healing multi-generational trauma, coming to understand and forgive my mother and myself as full and flawed human beings, and—through embracing an authentic life for myself—resuscitating what was beautiful and noble in the movements of the 1960s and attempting to integrate them into contemporary life and learn from them as we find ourselves in similarly turbulent and divided times.