There are many reasons to love a good misery memoir: In my case, reading about other people's dysfunctional childhoods offers a sense of community, a sisterhood of resilient Gen Xers who survived a 1970s childhood. Cea Sunrise Person's engaging new memoir, North of Normal, evokes both the miserable excesses and occasional beauty of growing up in a counterculture family in the wilderness of the Me Decade.

For the Person family, the wilderness was real. Cea's grandfather Dick was not only committed to living off the land, but highly skilled at doing so and deeply suspicious of Western civilization. He takes his family—grandma Jeanne, baby Cea, her teenage mother and two aunts—from California into the Canadian outback to live in a tipi and survive off game and wild plants. Clothing is optional, sex is out in the open, and much pot is smoked.

This outback idyll of sorts is broken up by Cea's mother, who follows one man after another into questionable circumstances. Cea is lucky, she is told, to have a mother who loves her, but as Cea grows older she wants the one thing her mother can't give her: normality. Leaving home at 13, Cea breaks with her family toward independence, which is seen as a betrayal.

While the strength and resilience Cea learns in the wilderness help her survive the predators of the "civilized" world (she goes on to become an internationally successful model), it's a long journey to normal, whatever that is. There's not a shred of self-pity here, which makes the depiction of a child adrift in hippie decadence all the more affecting. North of Normal offers readers a well-crafted story and a sensible, clear-eyed narrator.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this affecting memoir, Person describes growing up in the early 1970s amid the "tipi camp" where her extended family was squatting on Indian lands in Alberta, Canada. With a free-spirited teenage mother—the daughter of a Korean War vet and forest ranger who yearned to live in nature unencumbered by the U.S. government—Person was doted upon by her pot-smoking grandparents and uninhibited if emotionally erratic aunts and uncles (one uncle, Dane, moved in and out of a mental asylum), although it was challenging living in tipis with no running water, eating whatever her grandfather, Papa Dick, happened to hunt, and using the communal "shit pit," all in a harsh northern climate. As long as she had her mother close, Person was happy, except that her mother had to find men to support them, and therein began a peripatetic cycle of moving in with one marijuana-growing, thieving boyfriend after another, or back to the tipis with her grandparents. From time to time Person did visit her father, a middle-class professional established in a new marriage in San Francisco, yet it was a modeling competition at age 13 that allowed her finally to feel somewhat "normal" and find her own identity. Agent, Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. (July)