"In this remarkable memoir, the qualities that have long distinguished Francine Prose's fiction and criticism--uncompromising intelligence, a gratifying aversion to sentiment, the citrus bite of irony--give rigor and, finally, an unexpected poignancy to an emotional, artistic, and political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s--the decade, as she memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the '60s weren't...