Spending and Sharing Time

Time, like money, is something we can spend, borrow, steal, donate, and share. Diaries and memoirs are one way for writers to share a bit of their time with us. Margaret Sartor’s Miss American Pie A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s can be read on a couple of levels. It can be read as a historical document that provides an insight some textbooks covering the same time period and geography fail to do. It can also be read as a diary of an adolescent girl’s struggles, defeats, and triumphs.

I took the second approach when I read Sartor’s book and was amazed with how much I had in common with her. It isn’t so much that Ms. Sartor and I are some sort of kindred spirits as much as we were both adolescents at one point. Adolescents don’t share the same experiences, but that period of our lives does present similar struggles. This is what I find most appealing about Miss American Pie. We were both adolescents at one point moving through life on our own unique paths that on occasion ran parallel and sometimes intersected. We often shared similar struggles during the same time periods of our lives.

Margaret Sartor’s Miss American Pie is at turns informative, entertaining, and subtlety humbling. Seeing how somebody else spent her time can help us put our own lives and times in perspective.