This Book Will Change Your Life - Hidden River by the Sara Lippmann.

Thoughts on what it is was like when the adults were “willfully not paying attention.”

While I have no great desire to be cute and share some kind of meta riff on how entertaining it is to ruminate on Sara Lippmann’s singular voice or the ongoing awesome ferocity of Lippmann’s writing in general, and more specifically her propulsive new novel Hidden River, by noting that I have Sara’s voice in my head as I write this—it’s just that I really do have her voice in my head as I’m also simultaneously producing the new episode of This Podcast Will Change Your Life—which stars Lippmann, and it is kind of fun, and yes, sorry, meta.

What’s lingering from my re-listen of this episode is a phrase Lippmann used when talking about what it’s like to be GenX and growing-up as many of us did in the 1970s and 80s in terms of the parents and other adults who were ostensibly protecting us, or at least watching over us. Which is to say, they were “willfully not paying attention.” I can appreciate some may read this as a sweeping generalization, and maybe it is, or at least a sort of a commentary on the privilege we come from that became an anti-privilege—our parents felt that they had chosen to raise us in places where we were safe, and most of us were.

We just weren’t that safe from adults themselves who were far more focused on themselves, and their own pleasure and challenges, and if one were vulnerable or in need of something stable, there was the possbility one might be seen as prey. Is this also a potentially sweeping statement, it is, is it untrue, I’m not so certain, and regardless, does Lippmann beautifully capture what this era looked like for some, no question.

Hidden River, and this gives nothing away, is a book about grooming, though far more than that, it’s about what can happen when the adults are willfully not paying attention, except for the ones who are paying far too much attention. It’s also about looking back on such a time and trying to make sense of what happened then and what it looks like to be alive so many years after it happened.

It can be hard to look at such things, and yet in Lippmann’s hands, it’s also impossible to look away. Will Hidden River change your life? Of course it will, and that’s because reading Lippmann always does, even as this book goes further, deeper, and reads more propulsively then any and all of Lippmann’s work. So, that, and do be on the lookout for Lippmann’s latest episode of This Podcast Will Change Your Life, because, well I suspect you know where that’s heading (c’mon, it too will change your life).

Sara Lippmann