My Generation: A Memoir of the Baby Boom

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New Release (November 2019)
What if the system broke down, and you had to find a way to live?
What if you wanted to find a better way, before it all went down?
What if a whole generation faced these questions for the first time?
That was My Generation.

baby boom memoir In this intensely personal memoir, Nowick Gray charts a unique yet representative journey through the tumultuous sixties and seventies, seeking alternatives to corporate conformity and the looming threat of apocalypse. His self-exile from East Coast suburbia spirals through campus rebellion, California dreaming, a testy Canadian romance, and an Inuit village preparing for its own revolution… bound for a back-to-the-land utopia in the mountains of British Columbia.

“So this was my pilgrimage, and I almost blew it on the first leg.”

With thirty dollars to his name, suburban refugee and baby boomer Nowick Gray survives his 3 a.m. catnap crossing the Mississippi, in a VW Beetle bound for the golden vision of California. An Ivy League education in antiwar politics, the poetry of nature, and the prerequisites of the era—sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll—has spurred his ambition to follow his bliss. But by then the mantra of My Generation has already changed from “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” to “Get real.”

back to the land At risk of fulfilling a Frank Zappa prophecy (“wind up working at a gas station)” Nowick pays his blue-collar dues, longing for love and purpose, before returning to university in Canada, and marrying into his new country. Qualified by a master’s degree to work nowhere but in the Inuit hinterland of Northern Quebec, the narrator extends his quest for a true home with a brief teaching career, before leaving it all behind for a life on the land in BC—mountain man and homesteader, peace crusader and new father.

For those who have been captivated by Kerouac, Ginsberg and Bukowski, all that 50s Beatnik society, they have the chance to add a new name in the pantheon: Nowick Gray. His book #MyGeneration is a wonderful account of a new Neo who struggles to leave behind the American Matrix. pic.twitter.com/MvbzADhdyT
— JorgKonstantin (@JorgKAwgernos) December 27, 2019