Pagan Time: An American Childhood Horror Book Review

For fans of Geoffrey Wolff’s Age of Consent and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, a wrenching and beautiful memoir of a child’s life in a sixties commune. 

“Sometimes it seems like I’ve spent my life searching for the words that will open my childhood for you. It’s always the same-even as I’m trying to use my story to knock down the wall between us, I can see that I’m turning myself into a freak, my childhood into a sideshow.” Pagan Time is the story of Micah Perks’s struggle to make comprehensible her unorthodox childhood. She was raised at her family’s commune in the Adirondack wilderness, and at the core of her book lie memories of and feelings for her wildly eccentric father, a self-proclaimed pagan intent on demolishing conventional boundaries and morality. This complex memoir mixes a moving celebration of the utopian spirit and its desire for community and freedom with a lacerating critique of the consequences of those desires-especially for the children involved. How could the campaign for a perfect home and family create such confusion and destruction? The sixties, for many, became a laboratory of hope and chaos, of good intentions run riot. “There is breathtaking beauty in this memoir… Micah Perks writes with great sympathy, subtlety, and precision about the explosive paradise of her youth.” -Joanna Scott, author of Make Believe.