Originally published on Venuszine.com
Clane Hayward’s memoir explores the progressive freedom and moralistic repressiveness of the hippie ethos with grace and humor. The Hypocrisy of Disco tells the story of Hayward’s nomadic adolescence in California, New Mexico, and Nevada between the ages of eleven and thirteen. She is shuttled between vacation cabins, open fields, and trailer parks by her quasi-mystical, macrobiotic mother until she is sent to live in New Mexico with her laissez faire, grease-monkey father and, finally, her straight paternal grandmother in Las Vegas.
Her story is a tragic and heartfelt testament to American idealism gone wrong. Clane’s mother H’lane’s anti-authoritarian open mindedness often spirals into didactic, controlling harangues about eating “shitfood,” which includes everything from oranges and cheese to cake. New clothes, party dresses, and other trappings of an average American childhood are also off limits. Describing a typical run-in over food, Hayward writes, “Your children eat out of garbage cans and off the sidewalk because of your head trips.” Food is a big issue for Clane and her hippie-kid cohorts, the Macroteam. These grudgingly macrobiotic super-heroes steal snacks from other kids’ lunches and bust into neighboring cabins to mainline sugar and dance to records. Their antics provide much of the levity in this otherwise disturbing, heart-wrenching book.
Hayward’s writing is strongest when she talks about the American West. Despite a childhood of hardship, frequent embarrassment, and sugar-lust, Hayward represents the idyllic beauty of Northern California in lush, broad strokes. As she grows older, she contrasts living among the redwoods with the bleak American expansionism of trailer parks, K-Marts, 7-11s, and empty parking lots. When a toss of H’lane’s I Ching coins determine that Clane should live with her father, Hayward writes of the journey, “…America is just one long highway baking quietly in the sun and waiting for the cars it bears. America from the bus felt like all space, all distance, and this made me feel empty inside and a little tired, my mind wiped clean, just waiting for the next thing to happen, waiting for the next place I would be.”
A feeling of weightlessness and quiet despair permeates Hayward’s story.She inhabits a world of mystics, stoners, and zealots eager to change the world, but whose stringent limitations build systems of exclusion that mirror the straight world they have repudiated.
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ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Hypocrisy of Disco (Chronicle Books)
By Clane Hayward
256 pages
$22.95
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