With little more than a run-down Jeep and their newborn baby in tow, author Micah Perks’ parents set out in 1963 to build a school and a utopian community in the mountains. The school would become known as a place to send teens with drug addictions and emotional problems, children with whom Micah and her sister would grow up.
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 ’60s, for many, became a laboratory of hope and chaos, as young idealists tested the limits of possibility.
Micah Perks has cast her unflinching and precise eye on her own history and has illuminated not only those years of her childhood, but a wide-open moment that marked our culture for all time.
"Micah Perks re-imagines her magical, terrible childhood with funky, bittersweet sincerity. Pagan Time speeds by like the years it details--painfully, brilliantly vivid and totally out of control." Stewart O'Nan
“Perks’ breakneck memoir of childhood on a commune in the Adirondacks is a vigorous, dead-on portrait of the joy and confusion of counterculture life.” Publishers Weekly
Micah as a child.
“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
“Perks’ frank and complex account of her bizarre and dangerous childhood is morbidly fascinating.” Booklist
“This wonderful book has distilled the sixties into a rare and potent tincture. It is bittersweet, dangerous, full of mad enthusiasms, wild adventures, sexual excess, and genuine tragedy. Micah Perks never loses her perfect pitch…I could not put it down and cannot forget it.” Peter Coyote
The valley in the Adirondacks where Micah grew up.
The main house of the commune burning down.