WHERE IS LUV?

I am currently seeking representation for Where Is Luv? A Teenager’s Diary of Hope, Passion, and Total Confusion, a soulful, spirited memoir of my unusual adolescence living in suburban New York and Europe, featuring excerpts from my diaries. A universal but unique chronicle of growing up female, Where Is Luv? is set against the backdrop of a tumultuous era. While the country battled for its moral position in Vietnam and at home, I battled valiantly to figure out how to find love, sex, and just the right outfit.
   
Part I begins on New Year’s Day 1965, in small-town Rye, New York, with entries from ages ten to twelve about quintessential crushes on boys, clashes with Mom, embarrassing pimples, and the joys of Kotex. Then, on August 12, 1966, my family left the States for a new life abroad. Part II features excerpts from four angst-packed years in cosmopolitan Munich, Germany, where my father was an executive at Radio Liberty.

As if navigating adolescence with a menopausal Jewish mother and moody older brother wasn’t challenging enough, I coped with new friends, a foreign culture, and my budding desires. And I wrote about it all. But mostly I wrote about love. When Ricky Heidiger hit me over the head with his books in fifth grade, that was love. By tenth grade, love was lying topless with David Drysdale, smoking hash at a Bed-In. Love couldn’t be my parents’ bickering! Was love sexual? Spiritual? Each night I turned to my diary, hoping for answers. Where Is Luv? ends on August 12, 1970, when I sailed into New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, and toward the uncertainty of Sweet Sixteen.

Where Is Luv? offers the voyeuristic allure of an authentic teen diary and adds two powerful ingredients: passionate commentary on iconic 1960s events and colorful international settings. Highlights include the Robert Kennedy assassination, Nixon election, and Apollo 11 moon landing, as well as abundant pop-culture references, from go-go boots to Easy Rider to Jimi Hendrix.

Where Is Luv? features travelogues from fourteen countries and three continents. On the road, I encountered army brats and diplomat kids, artists and celebrities, hippie hitchers, a German rock drummer, and a kleptomaniac dressmaker, among a diverse cast of characters. Summer camp in Israel just after the 1967 war marks an emotional turning point, followed by a visit to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam weeks later. The book also includes pseudo-Shakespearean sonnets, antiwar haiku, girlish erotica, sketches of mod clothing, images of actual diary pages, and a Where Is Luv? vintage photo album.