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A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the SixtiesAuthor: Suze Rotolo
In this moving and entertaining memoir, Susan Rotolo recounts her experience of coming into herself, how she fell in and out of love with a young Bob Dylan, and what it was like to live in the bohemia of what was Greenwich Village in the 1960s. What was so interesting, for one who lived through the era, was how she recounted not just the details of her own life, but how she communicated the feelings of a nation in crisis: The Cuban Missile Crisis, desegregation, the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy and the tumultuous political scene thereafter-it’s all interspersed and mingling (Forrest Gump style), along with her own life, for the reader to enjoy.
The 60s were a time when young people came to Greenwich Village to find their voice, and, like so many others, Rotolo did. Rebelling against “the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade,” there was a language of curiosity and experimentation you see as you read about the eccentric occupants of this small area of New York City. Perhaps she sums it up best by saying that today Greenwich Village is a state of mind, no longer the place it once was. “In the end like finds like...A compelling and necessary idea will always find a place to plant itself. The creative spirit finds a way.”
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