[In "Looking Back" Joyce Maynard] tries to be both exemplar and critic, to trace her own and her contemporaries' lassitude and precocious world-weariness to the common experience of "growing up old in the sixties."

That meant not only the profound trivializing influence of the media…. In school and out, it [also] meant regimentation by insecurity, relentless pressure toward refuge in a group mind, toward the illusion of an averaged-out "we" with which each individual kid could identify by adopting the symbols the media offered him—in exchange for a cut of his rich, jingling allowance.

Joyce Maynard suffers as a writer from that averaged-out "we" as she does from other generational syndromes of which she's more aware: short attention span, fascination with banality. She often talks in group images, in generalities, and while these will be familiar to anyone from a similar background, they produce a soft thud...