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that any more. I feel no weariness for the world. Only a hunger to know as much of it as I can.          
    I see Looking Back now as a piece of cultural history in part, and partly an offering of nostalgia, for those readers born around the time I was, who lived through the experiences I did, and like me, formed so many of their ideas about the world from what went on in those times.
    I also see Looking Back as a book for young people—most of all any young person who feels like something of an outsider, as I now understand, and wish I’d known sooner, so many teenagers do. It would make me very happy to think that reading this book might inspire some young person to record and make sense of his or her own growing-up experiences—not the Kennedy and King assassinations any more, or Vietnam, but Columbine, and 9/11, and Iraq, the obsession with technology, the vast and seemingly irreversible destruction of air and soil, forest and ocean.
    And maybe, reading this, a young person will be moved to consider not only the kinds of events that I talk about here, but the kind I didn’t: the small personal truths that require the most courage to uncover and are the most valuable to explore. I’ll leave it to the sociologists to draw the sweeping pronouncements about where some segment of our culture or another may be headed and how they got that way. All I do these days is tell my own story and let the reader make of it what she or he will.
    Joyce Maynard
    April 2012

T O MY FRIEND H ANNA , at five, I am a grown-up. I do not feel like one—at nineteen, I’m at the midway point between the kindergartner and her mother, and I belong to neither generation—but I can vote, and drink in New York, and marry without parental consent in Mississippi, and get a life sentence, not reform school, if I shoot someone premeditatedly. Walking with Hanna in New York and keeping to the inside, as the guidebooks tell me, so that doorway muggers lunging out will get not her but me, I’m suddenly aware that, of the two of us, I am the adult, the one whose life means less, because I’ve lived more of it already; I’ve moved from my position as protected child to child protector; I am the holder of a smaller hand where, just ten years ago, my hand was held through streets whose danger lay not in the alleys but in the roads themselves, the speeding cars, roaring motorcycles. I have left childhood, and though I longed to leave it, when being young meant finishing your milk and missing “Twilight Zone” on TV because it came on too late, now that it’s gone I’m uneasy. Not fear of death yet (I’m still young enough to feel immortal) or worry over wrinkles and gray hair, but a sense that the fun is over before it began, that I’m old before my time—why isn’t someone holding my hand still, protecting me from the dangers of the city, guiding me home?
    I remember kneeling on the seat of a subway car, never bothering to count the stops or peer through all those shopping bags and knees to read the signs, because she would know when to get off, she’d take my hand; I remember looking out the window to see the sparks fly, underpants exposed to all the rush-hour travelers and never worrying that they could see, while all around me, mothers had to cross their legs or keep their knees together. And later, driving home, leaning against my mother’s shoulder while her back tensed on the seat and her eyes stared out at the yellow lines, it was so nice to know I was responsible for nothing more than brushing my teeth when we got home, and not even that, if we got home late enough.
    Hanna doesn’t look where we’re going, never bothers to make sure she can find her way home again, because she knows I will take care of those things, and though I feel I am too young to be so old in anybody’s eyes, it’s just a feeling, not a fact. When it rains, she gets the plastic rain hat, and when the ball of ice cream on her cone falls off, I give her