Memoirs

My Mother and Me, Making it in New York After Making it Out of Berlin and Beirut by Peter Schrag ’55. This charming memoir saves a great deal of information about the life of Ilse Schrag from falling into oblivion and preserves a record of her struggles to make a life for herself and her son, the author, in New York, when Germany became too dangerous for their survival. She and the father of her child ended their short relationship in Beirut; she eventually linked up with the artist Karl Schrag, who adopted young Peter. The intensity of the mother-son relationship was a mixed blessing. Peter has to face the challenge of asserting his own identity and making his own choices. Many of the remembrances are funny and reveal Ilse’s strengths and weaknesses, one in the same since she was quite overbearing. Peter was admitted to Friends Seminary bac…

Body in Space, My Life with Tammy by Margaret Gonzalez te. So here is my own book with Tammy on the cover. If you were in the lower school in the years from 1984-1988, you might remember her. I got Tammy from the foster care system when she was five. Elsewhere on this site you can find more about this book. One thing that was driven home to me from raising Tammy is how much society suffers when we don’t address children’s needs in a timely fashion.

Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life by Amanda Stern ’89. This is a book you can’t put down, and which stays with you long after you’ve finished it. It is certainly a must-read for practitioners of clinical psych. Rarely does someone with a particular disorder have the writing talent to convey what it is like from the inside. Little Amanda is in a perpetual state of anxiety. When she takes the ERB’s, she is so terrified of failure that she doesn’t fill in a single bubble. She is plagued by magical thinking – if I go away, someone will die. She needs to create a bold external persona which doesn’t coincide with her inner terrors.

Memoirs often are exercises in humility and Little Panic is no exception. But it is also the story of valiance. The creativity which was apparent in the two other works by Amanda that…

The Girl in the Back, a Female Drummer’s Life with Bowie, Blondie, and the 70’s Rock Scene by Laura Davis-Chainin ’78?. While students at Friends, Laura and her friend Bill Arning were drawn to the exciting world of rock, playing out just a few blocks away at rock-mecca CBGB. When they decide to form their own band, the Student Teachers, Laura finds herself struggling to maintain equilibrium between her daytime school life and her nighttime rehearsals and gigs in the band. With minimal parental support, Laura is swept into a world of drugs, easy money alternating with homelessness, and intense relationships with men who seem to have made it to the big time. Laura tries to figure out who she is and how to push back to reach her own goals. Jimmy Destri of Blondie becomes a major love, and this relationship propels her willy-nilly into adulthood. Through Destr…