About the Book
Gritty Courage and Love in the Endless Struggle for Power
A young woman struggles to ferret out her place in the counterculture of the late 1960s era only to find in 2022 America that everything she holds dear, even her own life, is in jeopardy.
Connie Borders sees the changes coming down in 1969 and refuses to let them pass her by.
Rejecting her parents' outdated lifestyle and the narrow, whitebread path prescribed for her, Connie leaves Indianapolis for California to stop the Vietnam War and reshape the country into the Woodstock Nation. Her course veers when Carlos, an older university student who is a first-generation, Black Puerto Rican American, persuades her that radical Chicago is where it's at.
During a whirlwind of protests and an acid-laced rock concert, electricity runs between Connie and Carlos. But when she witnesses a shooting in the wake of Black Panther Fred Hampton's murder, she is forced to leave Chicago. From the Midwest to Berkeley and back, Connie goes on a freewheeling search for her place in the fractured movement. Naïve and flawed but pure-hearted, she navigates the complexities of friendship and family, of unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion, and of cultural and political divides, while untangling her desire for Carlos and his hardcore passion for Puerto Rican independence. Connie learns she must trust her instincts to seek out the whole story-which may not be the whole truth.
Fifty years later, when Connie is a pro-choice activist in Chicago, her questioned convictions put her in chilling danger.
About the Author :
The daughter of florists and granddaughter of a prolific gardener, award-winning author Claire Arbogast was born in 1950. She grew up among the winding streets and deep front porches of historic Irvington on the eastside of Indianapolis. But her life took a wide turn as books and the times challenged her limited perspective of the world. This questioning wove its way into her very fiber, leading her to try on different ways to live, different ways to love, and different ways to write. After a few years of exploring (southern Indiana, Chicago, California, The Farm in Tennessee, Albuquerque, touring the country in a handmade camper, and a couple winters in Alaska), she earned a degree in journalism from Indiana University-Bloomington and went on to work in communications, living in Fort Wayne, Bloomington, and Cincinnati. She is the recipient of a 2009-10 Greer Artist Fellowship grant and a 2008 Ropewalk Writers Retreat Masters Creative Non-fiction Workshop Scholarship.These days, she gardens and writes in Bloomington, Indiana, relishing every sweet day with a thirst for sorting, rejecting, and adapting to the infinite stream of ideas that flow into our lives. Her memoir, "Leave the Dogs at Home," was published by Indiana University Press in 2015. It is the 2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection. Check out her books and blog, Inside Stories, at www.clairearbogast.com.
Review :
"Historically rich, with ... searing contemporary relevance." -Kirkus Reviews "OUR VERDICT: GET IT."
"Through Connie, we get a fresh and hard look at the history of this country and its quiet yet aggressive war against women, and Claire Arbogast writes brilliantly about the distortion of facts throughout the years that have led to confusion and misinformation ... If Not the Whole Truth is an important and necessary read for a nation that is now slipping backwards in time. This book reignites the fire and the passion in my heart for hope ... This is a book to be shared, and taught, and gifted. More importantly, this is a novel written out of necessity, and the author seeks through this engaging narrative, to rewrite false narratives and remind us of what is capable through resistance." -Fabienne Josaphat, author of Kingdom of No Tomorrow, 2023 winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction
"Sense of scene and characterization is wonderful ... Intriguing and, at times, captivating ... [W]anted more of the 2022 section ... in light of the madness surrounding us today." -Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program
"At the heart ...a nest of women's relationships and the way women had to navigate sexism and the patriarchy during the 60s. The 21st century coda is a sobering meditation on the lingering, unplanned for after-effects of that most revolutionary of decades. No easy answers here, but the questions are so very interesting, all within a wonderful page-turner of a novel.." -Joan Hawkins, author of School and Suicide and the forthcoming Wounded Galaxies 1968
"Explosive, episodic, high-velocity adventure, through a contemporary looking glass ... very hip, compelling and compelled ..." -Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana
"A meticulously researched trip, in all senses of the word, through the upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies. Connie navigates every world that an idealistic young woman might stray into and finds that even within the antiwar and back-to-the-land movements, men still expect to be in charge. Connie likes men, in bed and out of it, but she doesn't like that, and what she does about it may be the heart of this engaging novel." - Amanda Cockrell, author of Coyote Weather
"Read If Not the Whole Truth if you want a story about a young woman trying to find and keep control over her own life and live in a way that doesn't make her compromise herself or her values ... how two people can see the same thing in vastly different ways and make room for those two ways to both be true ... how the struggle for freedom and self-determination can look different through the decades but also remains the same." -Independent Book Review
"[B]rings the turbulent 1960s vividly alive with one midwestern woman's journey through the big movements of the era to a personal life of peace and meaning."-Barbara Shoup, author of An American Tune
