Whether it's a rainy redwood forest, a red-clay desert, or a shiny subdivision outside of Las Vegas, the American West is the place you go in order to become someone else. A new name, a new life. Clane Hayward's parents did this. They ended up in the Upper Haight in the year Clane was born, during the Summer Of Love, in search of a new kind of world. At the opening of Hayward's beautiful and heartbreaking memoir of her childhood, The Hypocrisy of Disco, she is eleven. She is living with her mother H'lane and two of her younger siblings, Haud and Ki, in a tumble-down house on the Russian River. Hayward writes from a child's perspective, partly misunderstanding and partly ultra-perceptive, angry and rebellious but wanting to be cared for and loved more than anything. Her descriptions of the small joys of a wild childhood are achingly beautiful.

The book opens with Clane, her siblings, and the kids of her mom's best friend running out of the house together at dusk. "Slap bang goes the screen door three or four times fast, because the seven of us kids are all leaving the house at once...Together we make a sound of slapping tennies on dirt, of jeans and corduroys whistling, of gravel skipping ahead of our hurrying feet." The West might be the place you go to be free, but the price of that freedom is loneliness. "How come there's so many of us kids with our parents spread all over the place having different kids wherever they go? I ask H'lane. H'lane says, free love, man...I haven't seen my dad for a few years."


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