Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid

He is sixteen in 1964. He has friends. He has fun. He smokes unfiltered Luckies. He loses his virginity. He gets his first car and drives with abandon. He is growing up as fast as he can, if not as fast as he wants. A white boy from the suburbs, he goes into the Black city to see the Motown Revue, and to listen to jazz in smokey clubs. Inspired by the non-violent civil rights movement, he embarks on an activist path that in a few years will place him in the militant Weather Underground. He has sex with girls, hiding the unmentionable fact that he is gay. His father is checked out while his mother is dying--another thing that may not be discussed. He pretends he doesn't care, projecting himself as a worldly proto-adult, but he is a scared kid. Performance Anxiety is a vivid portrayal of one boy's rocky youth--and of America on the brink of the cultural tumult known as ""the sixties."" With rare honesty and humble self-forgiveness Jonathan Lerner recalls the exuberance and pain of growing up in a time and place, and family, that seemed whole but were cracking apart.

About the Author :
Jonathan Lerner is the author of the novels Caught in a Still Place, Alex Underground, and Lily Narcissus, and the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children. He is a journalist focusing on urban design and environmental issues and a longtime contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine. He lives with his husband, the nonprofit leader and community advocate Peter Frank, in New York's Hudson Valley.

Review :
"Jonathan Lerner walks us into the year 1964. The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam are in the background. In the foreground is his fractured family, their houses, moves, connection, dysfunction--compellingly re-examined as an invitation for us to examine our own lives, in this time of increasing global fracture and dysfunction." --Eli Andrew Ramer, author of Ever After "Jonathan Lerner's deceptively breezy memoir roots around in his peripatetic childhood not just for the sake of telling colorful, funny stories but in search of truth, accuracy, and in some cases self-forgiveness. He is excruciatingly honest about the self-torture queer boys undergo in their effort to live up to some flimsy concept of acceptable masculinity. Along the way he investigates the peculiar phenomenon of memory, seemingly concrete and yet surprisingly malleable to the forces of time, shame, and distance." --Don Shewey, author of Daddy Lover God: A Sacred Intimate Journey "Performance Anxiety is a rich, textured account of Jonathan Lerner's journey through the complexities of adolescence and early adulthood, set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing America. With unflinching honesty, Lerner explores his struggles with sexual identity, self-discovery, and the pressures of conformity in a world that often feels both exhilarating and unforgiving." --Eric Cervini, author of The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America