Playing Catch With My Mother

the long version

After the Sixties, after feminism, after political correctness, how does a boy become a man? In Playing Catch with My Mother, Greg Lichtenberg speaks for the silent sons of the gender revolution. The family experiment began with hope and energy. His mother returned to writing poetry and found her first job. His father grew his hair long and quit corporate life to become a rock critic. Together they set out to make a close and tolerant family, where men and women were equals, where children were respected, where a little boy who dreamed of sports heroism could still be allowed to cry. With the intensity of a child's perceptions, Lichtenberg evokes both the promise of this brave new world and the searing disappointment of its downward spiral into harsh words, blows, and divorce. If his parents were at war, how could he trust the truth of what they taught? And if violence and doubt warred in him as well, how could he trust himself? Threaded like a fuse through it all is the power of sexual desire to explode every preconception. As Greg pursues the elusive, irresistible redhead who is everything he hoped for and nothing he expected, he confronts for himself masculinity's unanswered questions about love, equality, violence, and passion.