Notes from Nethers: Growing Up In A Sixties Commune [Paperback]

Sandra Lee Eugster (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2007

This is a unique and honest account of the author's childhood growing up in a commune in rural Virginia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nethers, as the commune came to be called, was started by Eugster's "liberal, radical, union organizing mother," Carla. Committed to radical social change and caught up in the fervor of counterculture, Carla, separated from the father of her three children, unilaterally sold their middle-class house in Baltimore, and moved to a rural area. They moved in 1969, when Eugster was 9 years old.

The culture shock was difficult for Eugster's two older sisters, but for the 9-year-old Eugster it was especially confusing and frightening. She recounts the difficult transition from a traditional family life to one in a communal setting. Eventually, Carla was able to buy a large farmhouse with acres of land around it, and this became the commune. An array of colorful characters drifted into the commune, and Eugster writes sensitively about being a child in the midst of all this. She accurately depicts communal living in all its complexity, describing weekly consensus meetings, days of silence, and quarterly sweat-hut rituals. This is essentially the dramatic story of a young girl given complete freedom in a communal setting, which at many times felt to her like abandonment.

Notes from Nethers is a riveting look at a time and place long gone. It is an important piece of American cultural history, and the history of efforts to create a utopian society, underscoring the fact that no matter how ideally a societal structure is conceived, its enactment cannot escape the imperfections of humans who embody it.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There are iconic excesses—nude sweat-lodge ceremonies, interminable house meetings, ghastly raw-food diets, a public birthing followed by placenta-enriched soup—in the author's fraught memoir of her childhood on the titular rural Virginia commune and attached free school, founded by her mother, Carla. Psychologist Eugster was duly scarred by the countercultural chaos and flux of strangers into, and friends out of, the commune, which left her feeling trapped in freedom, lonely, alienated and withdrawn, a child adrift in an adult's idealized venture. Still, this isn't Augusten Burroughs territory. Nothing too outrageous happened to Eugster, and Carla, the book's charismatic, domineering center, also appears a responsible parent who fights epic battles to enforce a 9 p.m. bedtime. Indeed, many of the traumas that occasion Eugster's dudgeon—a snit with a schoolmate who rebuffs her, a pet accidentally run over by a communard's car—seem like ordinary growing pains. Young Sandra's sensitive, sometimes neurotic temperament often looms larger than the commune's transient, unstructured environment in explaining her intense feelings of anomie and abandonment. Eugster paints an engaging portrait of the odd Nethers lifestyle, but it's very much a child's view—an idiosyncratic perspective that alternates between scenes of idyllic beauty and small tragedies blown out of proportion. (Dec.)
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Review

How can an endeavor founded on love and community traumatize a child? Sandra Eugster's fascinating account of her mother's radical plan to remove her children from an ordinary suburban childhood to found a commune is a riveting, evocative documentary of a time and a place--and its effect on a life--that might be that rare thing, a story that could have been told by no one else. I love this book. -- Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Still Summer

In this probing, intimate memoir, Eugster recounts the challenges of growing up in an environment where hte margin between freedom and endangerment is slim . . . But Eugster, now a psychologist, also writes with deep tenderness about her family, the skills and strength she gained from her exceptional youth, and the shifting relationship between parents and maturing children . . . this is a fascinating, evenhanded view of counterculture life in the 1970s. -- Booklist

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers (October 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0897335619
• ISBN-13: 978-0897335614
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #498,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life in a Sixties Commune, December 20, 2007

By 

Nancy R. Matus (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Notes from Nethers: Growing Up In A Sixties Commune (Paperback)

Sandra Eugster tells a compelling story about her experiences growing up on a sixties commune. She is thrust into an adult life-style without the background and skills to cope with it, and certainly not by choice. The book gives a rich and detailed picture of life on a hippy commune. For those of us who lived during the same times in a more conventional way, it paints a colorful canvas of an alternative way of life. The author's relationship with the other members of the commune, her mother, and sisters involves the reader emotionally and keeps one wondering what could possibly happen next.
I highly recommend Notes from Nethers: Growing Up In A Sixties Communeas an informative and entertaining real life memoir.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A matter-of-fact glimpse into what commune life was truly like: the good, the bad and the ugly., February 2, 2008

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Notes from Nethers: Growing Up In A Sixties Commune (Paperback)

Notes from Nethers: Growing Up in a Sixties Commune is the true-life memoir of author Sandra Eugster, largely centering around her adolescence in a commune in rural Virginia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The commune Nethers, started by Eugster's mother Carla, was meant to promote social change and grounded in the counterculture of the era. Immersed in the culture shock of commune life at the tender age of nine, Eugster had to adjust along with her older sisters to the complexities of commune life, weekly consensus meetings, days of silence, sweat-hut rituals, and more. Yet even more challenging was making the re-adjustment to the outside world after the commune dissolved - studying for SATs (given that her own education ended at third grade), and gradually learning social skills that she'd never had the opportunity to cultivate amid years of isolation from "normal" people her own age. "The wish to return to innocence came with the thought that by removing the barriers between adult and child, the children could be the bridge back to innocence. But the force of nature goes the other direction, and many children lost their innocence devastatingly early. I often think I was fortunate not to have been molested. But in a sense I was. My exposure to sexual matters was premature, as was my close contact with extreme human peculiarities and, ultimately, the harsh reality of adults doing what was right for themselves as opposed to their charges." Highly recommended as a matter-of-fact glimpse into what commune life was truly like: the good, the bad and the ugly.

3.0 out of 5 stars Innocent, slow paced, October 22, 2011

By 

César Chávez "Tax the Rich... free the poor." (Amsterdam) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Notes from Nethers: Growing Up In A Sixties Commune (Paperback)

No need to reinvent the wheel: read the 3 star review by Caraculiambro for insight to what this book is like: Innocent, slow paced, heart-warming... all not bad things if that's what you're looking for. If, however, you're interested in reading about a classic '60's commune try Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture.