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.