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Getting Real: Drifting Into Middle Age

de Peter Weissman

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1731,237,506 (4.67)8
In 1978, when Peter moves back to Manhattan, it's a different world. The kids zipping around Washington Square Park on rollerblades aren't hippies; they leave him feeling old and irrelevant. But there are others like him, a generation fading into history more quickly than he would have imagined. He reconnects with it and his aging past through an old pal who introduces him to a subculture obsessed with feminism and sexual politics, instead of civil rights and the old antiwar movement. Ten years in the cocoon of a safe and eventually unsatisfying marriage have left him unprepared for the raging battle of the sexes. In bemusement, he stumbles through a noir period of casual liaisons and tenuous friendships, takes odd writing jobs to pay the rent on an overpriced studio apartment, and like a Trollope innocent, finds himself editing a weekly newspaper that fronts for a labor racketeering operation. He then latches onto freelance work for book publishers, which rekindles his own enduring obsession to write a great novel about the sixties. That nostalgia for the best and worst of times, or just youth itself, is the subtext of Getting Real as the intrepid narrator moves sardonically through ill-suited relationships and renovated neighborhoods in discrete, interlocking stories as he encounters life's surprising, unpredictable turning points. Peter Weissman has been writing about himself for forty years. In I Think, Therefore Who Am I? he's an East Village hippie, and in Digging Deeper a Manhattan office worker enduring an ironic rehabilitation to society following his psychedelic drug year. He meets his first wife, an art student, quits his job, and with youthful exuberance the two of them relocate to Berkeley, an outpost of itinerant poets, writers, and spiritual seekers. But there's not much work, and he ends up at the Oakland post office, casing and delivering mail ten hours day. It's a miserable gig, though in retrospect, writing about it, a good microcosm of politics and racism in the seventies. In Getting Real, back in Manhattan, single and beginning anew again, he's still looking for work that suits him. After several false starts he stumbles into freelance editing, and with the same go-with-the-flow tao that characterizes his younger iterations, answers a personal ad in the Village Voice, meets the woman who will become his second wife, and settles in as a stay-at-home father in Brooklyn-until they uproot to the country. Today, the author and his wife Rita still live in Woodstock, upstate. Against the background of changing seasons, prominent in Getting Real, he edits manuscripts, exercises by bicycling in summer and splitting wood in winter, and throughout the year wrestles with cabin fever, which has become part of his psyche.… (mais)
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Exibindo 3 de 3
Book #23 [Getting Real, Drifting into Middle Age] by Peter Weissman

[Getting Real] is the third installment in Peter Weissman’s series of memoirs, picking up his story as he drifts into the middle years. The previous books, [I Think, Therefore Who Am I?] and [Digging Deeper], followed him from his early psychedelic years to adulthood. With this new chapter in life, more than the others, Weissman establishes himself as the ultimate everyman.

We find Peter back in the Manhattan of his early years, licking the wounds from a failed marriage and an attempt to assimilate into work-a-day life on the West Coast. The world has moved on in surprising ways from the psychedelic days of his youth. There is a feeling that everyone has jettisoned what stitched together the collective fabric of his generation. Having checked out for a decade while everyone else moved on, Peter is adrift trying to re-establish a foothold in his old circles and family. Along the way, he finds another cause to champion at a weekly labor publication. When he uses his new voice to challenge corrupt racketeering practices, he loses that job as well. And like his previous life phases, he falls into a new life – backing into a new marriage after answering a personal advertisement and into a new career as a freelance editor.

[Getting Real] is the weakest of Weissman’s three memoirs from a structural and technical standpoint. The story doesn’t really take hold until about a third of the way into the book – when he finally shakes off the tattered remains of his previous life in New York. But this book is the one that most concretely establishes him as the perfect everyman. Peter’s haphazard path, though life is peppered with such sincere self-immolation and doubt that it’s imminently recognizable as a type for everyone’s meandering and fragile path through life.

Bottom Line: Peter Weissman is the ultimate every-man.
4 bones!!!!! ( )
1 vote blackdogbooks | Nov 28, 2017 |
In Getting Real, author Peter Weissman recounts various experiences from his life from the late seventies up through the nineties. Each chapter presents a self-contained episode -- sometimes comical, sometimes bittersweet, but always thoughtful -- which ultimately fit together to paint a picture of both the era and the author.

Some of my favorite chapters cover Weissman’s time as an editor for a labor oriented weekly. The stories of pulling all-nighters to finish putting a newspaper together before deadline are fascinating to me. I have spent some time myself writing for various media outlets, and while modern technological advances have certainly made things easier for writers today, I can’t help but romanticize the days of physically setting page layouts. I would be plenty happy just reading about that, but the newsroom setting is just the backdrop for an even more intriguing story. Eventually Weissman learns that there are some shady things going on behind the scenes with the paper, and after he upsets the upper management, he decides to goes out in a blaze of glory. One cannot help but cheer for the author throughout.

It was perhaps a given that I would enjoy the anecdotes about newspapers and copyediting, considering my own background as a writer. What was more surprising was how much the other parts of the book resonated with me as well. Peter Weissman comes from a very different world than I do. We grew up in different eras, on different coasts, and come from fairly different backgrounds. Despite that, my mind kept returning to a part early on in the book where, while discussing favorite authors in a Manhattan bar, a friend of Weissman’s remarks: “Life doesn’t change much. The same things we experience now, they experienced then.”

I found this sentiment to be equally true with Getting Real. While the stories contained within are uniquely Weissman’s, and filtered through his own personal lens, the feelings and topics are universal. Things like finding love, starting a family, and making a home. How relationships change as you get older, or how people that were once close friends begin to drift away as you grow apart. And of course, how with time we are reminded more and more of our own mortality, as family members and loved ones pass on, leaving us to consider our own legacy.

The very end of the book tells the story of a family friend's final year, and ultimately his funeral. Weissman notes that the funeral -- largely organized by the deceased before his passing -- covers many of the man's accomplishments but makes no mention of the man as a father or husband. This bothers the author at first, but he ultimately decides that is okay if his friend chose to be remembered in his best possible light.

That this is the book's final thought paints an interesting contrast to the fact that the book chronicles many of Weissman's own struggles as a husband and father. For all of the interesting tales Weissman shares with the reader, not once does he go out of his way to paint himself in a positive light -- you never get the sense that he is twisting stories or changing details to make himself look better. Rather it seems Weissman is only interested in presenting himself on the page simply as he is, for better or for worse.

It is that sincerity that makes Weissman’s writing such a pleasure to read. I highly recommend this book. ( )
3 vote thejoetoknow | Sep 15, 2016 |
Getting Real: Drifting into Middle Age is the natural conclusion to a trilogy comprising approximately thirty years. In I Think, Therefore Who Am I? Memoir of a Psychedelic Year, the author is a young man in New York City's East Village, plunged into the heady drug culture of the sixties, sometimes euphoric, more often adrift. In Digging Deeper, A Memoir of the Seventies, he wakes up from that dream to move towards what looks like normalcy--Berkeley, California--while pursuing his desire to write that will capture the drugged sixties and supporting himself and his wife by working for the Oakland post office.

In this book, he begins again, divorced now, jobless, and finds his way back to what he calls in the second chapter "Club Manhattan." On the heels of his former repressed marriage, he loses himself in a world of sexual encounters and indiscriminate partnerships in the context of late seventies feminism, which has a political bite that tests him no less than the women he encounters. Eventually, following a "Noir Period" of wild oats sown, bouncing around Brooklyn neighborhoods, he meets a woman through a personal ad who has also been informed by ideals of the sixties. Shortly after the birth of their daughter, they move upstate, to the town of Woodstock, and struggle to adapt to a new life.

What I like about this book, and remains constant throughout all of the author's non-fiction novels, is his awareness of himself and his context. With his poetic deftness with language, his ear for dialogue, his unique ability to capture his inner world amid rigorous attention to the details of time and place make this book a page turner. As he did with psychedelic experimentation, then the drudgery of work and it racial tensions in the first two books, in Getting Real he drifts into his middle age exploring personal life--aging, illness, and death--with no less acuity than the changing seasons. ( )
1 vote rubybookster | Sep 1, 2015 |
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In 1978, when Peter moves back to Manhattan, it's a different world. The kids zipping around Washington Square Park on rollerblades aren't hippies; they leave him feeling old and irrelevant. But there are others like him, a generation fading into history more quickly than he would have imagined. He reconnects with it and his aging past through an old pal who introduces him to a subculture obsessed with feminism and sexual politics, instead of civil rights and the old antiwar movement. Ten years in the cocoon of a safe and eventually unsatisfying marriage have left him unprepared for the raging battle of the sexes. In bemusement, he stumbles through a noir period of casual liaisons and tenuous friendships, takes odd writing jobs to pay the rent on an overpriced studio apartment, and like a Trollope innocent, finds himself editing a weekly newspaper that fronts for a labor racketeering operation. He then latches onto freelance work for book publishers, which rekindles his own enduring obsession to write a great novel about the sixties. That nostalgia for the best and worst of times, or just youth itself, is the subtext of Getting Real as the intrepid narrator moves sardonically through ill-suited relationships and renovated neighborhoods in discrete, interlocking stories as he encounters life's surprising, unpredictable turning points. Peter Weissman has been writing about himself for forty years. In I Think, Therefore Who Am I? he's an East Village hippie, and in Digging Deeper a Manhattan office worker enduring an ironic rehabilitation to society following his psychedelic drug year. He meets his first wife, an art student, quits his job, and with youthful exuberance the two of them relocate to Berkeley, an outpost of itinerant poets, writers, and spiritual seekers. But there's not much work, and he ends up at the Oakland post office, casing and delivering mail ten hours day. It's a miserable gig, though in retrospect, writing about it, a good microcosm of politics and racism in the seventies. In Getting Real, back in Manhattan, single and beginning anew again, he's still looking for work that suits him. After several false starts he stumbles into freelance editing, and with the same go-with-the-flow tao that characterizes his younger iterations, answers a personal ad in the Village Voice, meets the woman who will become his second wife, and settles in as a stay-at-home father in Brooklyn-until they uproot to the country. Today, the author and his wife Rita still live in Woodstock, upstate. Against the background of changing seasons, prominent in Getting Real, he edits manuscripts, exercises by bicycling in summer and splitting wood in winter, and throughout the year wrestles with cabin fever, which has become part of his psyche.

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