Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney on the Liberations of the Seventies

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s latest book, “Lake Effect,” begins in 1977, and follows the story of a woman who finds her staid domestic life style disrupted by her era’s shifting mores. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what it was like to be a woman who probably married in the nineteen-fifties, and then, all of a sudden, the world changed dramatically,” Sweeney said recently. “The choice for this character—which was the choice I saw many of my parents’ friends have to make—is, Do I stay in this small life that I chose as a very young person to keep my family intact, or do I choose happiness at the risk of upending family stability?” Not long ago, she joined us to discuss some of the books from that era that she revisited while crafting her novel, which speak to the changing moral codes of the time in which it unfolds. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Joy of Sex

by Alex Comfort

I was born in 1960, so I grew up in the seventies. My parents were avid readers, and we had a very bookish house. They had a bookshelf in their bedroom, where I would go find things to read—and which is where I came across their copy of “The Joy of Sex.” I was probably twelve or thirteen, and I remember being horrified because this was my parents’ book, but also enthralled. As a really bookish kid, I remember thinking, I don’t need this now, but I’m going to need this one day, and I’m glad I know where to find it.

This book is completely bonkers. Ariel Levy actually wrote a great article about Comfort, who was a British doctor. In the version of the book that I have, Comfort claims that he came across the source material of the book in the course of his research as a biologist. But, in reality, he wrote it, drawing a lot from a longtime affair that he was having with his wife’s best friend—they even took Polaroids of themselves that served as the models for the extremely insane drawings that appear in the book.

It’s a flawed document in many ways—it’s fat-phobic, it’s homophobic, there’s definitely some casual racism in there. But there’s also something earnest in it, in a very seventies way. It trumpets joy as the primary driver of an intimate relationship, and that was really new.

Forever . . .

by Judy Blume

I was probably sixteen when I read this. It’s a novel about a character named Katherine, who is a senior in high school. Katherine meets and quickly falls in love with a boy, Michael, who really wants to “do it” with her. The story is about how she goes about engaging in an intimate relationship with him. Katherine is very thoughtful about it—she knows when she’s not ready, and, when she is, she really sets the pace for the course of their relationship.

This book is fifty years old, and so there are definitely some things about it that don’t hold up to contemporary scrutiny. Blume has talked about seeing it as an artifact of a certain time and demographic—that is, a middle-class family on the East Coast. But I reread it recently and remembered how profound an impact it had on me at the time. One thing is that none of the central characters in the book—not Katherine, not anyone else—treat sex between two seventeen-year-olds with shame or disdain or distaste or discouragement. Her grandmother, for example, sends her a bunch of pamphlets on S.T.D.s and birth control! The adults’ attitude is really just, Well, of course this is going to happen—just be smart about your decision-making and make sure this is what you want to do, and stay safe. At one point, Katherine’s mother says something to her that I think is so profound. She says, I know you love Michael, and I know you want to be close with him in that way, but, once you do that, you can’t go back to just holding hands. To me, it’s a beautiful way to say, You’re young and you’re in love—enjoy all the little stages of it, and maybe linger in that easier place before you go to the harder place.

But I think what I really took with me from the book, through college and beyond—and what I think Blume has given to millions of young people—was a belief in my own desires and my own wants, and the conviction not to privilege another person’s desires over mine. “Forever . . .” really taught me how to trust myself and know what I wanted, to be the person I wanted to be, not the person someone else wanted me to be.